RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593
MILITARY EDUCATION in CHINA, 1842-1895

31

Chinese society.103 The new content of military education, which emphasized technical skills and diluted traditional values and loyalties somewhat, created a new professional elite that was significantly different in outlook from even such relatively progressive (and rare) individuals as Chou Sheng-chuan.104 For all his innovativeness, Chou remained bound by the inhibiting institutional structure of the Anhwei Army as well as the limits of his own educational experience within that force. As a result, he was never able to resolve certain fundamental conflicts in his self-image, attitude, and approach toward military affairs and reform.105

One is tempted to see in Chou the tensions of becoming "modern" and remaining "Chinese" suggested by Joseph Levenson, and even a kind of nineteenth-century version of the "red versus expert" dilemma of more recent times. Although Chou obviously admired Western military organization and repeatedly solicited foreign military advice, he was also anxious to demonstrate that the Chinese yung-ying model was in many respects equivalent or superior to the Western model, and he often reacted quite defensively to foreign criticisms.106 Chou admired foreign technology (at one point maintaining that bullets were more important than rations), but he also repeatedly stressed the human factor in warfare, down-playing on occasion foreign advantages in organization and weapons, emphasizing the importance of "will" (chih-ch'i), and periodically suggesting to Li Hung-chang the utility of rapidly recruiting volunteers (i-yung) and employing them as "surprise troops" (ch'i-ping).107

Obsessed with the need for intensive drill, Chou nonetheless continually employed the Sheng-chün in non-military tasks which undoubtedly compromised its fighting effectiveness—work on military agricultural colonies (t'un-t'ien), land reclamation, flood and famine relief work, and so forth.108 Finally, although Chou seems to have considered himself to be a professional soldier, and was anxious to foster positive attitudes toward the military, he, like virtually all of his fellow officers and commanders, esteemed civil status and sought identification with the civil bureaucracy.109

The more genuinely professional education provided by the Tientsin Military Academy after Chou's death helped resolve some of the tensions that seem to have plagued Chou.110 Certainly, it allowed the many Tientsin-trained commanders in Yüan Shih-k'ai's Peiyang Army to accept more readily the modern principle and
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1996
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641
197

3) Politics, like other business investments, is risky but potentially profitable. It is very much the case in financing a government while trying to satisfy vested interests.

Market for Political Investments

This raises the question of under what circumstances financing a regional government is possible? A convenient starting point is to look into the mentality of the time. In a despatch to the Colonial Office, C. Clementi, the Governor of Hong Kong and a famous sinologist who graduated from Oxford, diagnosed a decade of unsuccessful British policy toward China by saying:

A China united under a central Government is not applicable to the facts... China is a civilization, not a state

His contemporary also commented that

If Italy was but a geographical expression, China until very recent times has been but a social expression. China has been a society, not a state; and a Chinese, a familial not a political animal.

In a polity as large as China, regional distinctions are enormous, but these contemporaries believed that the split was between Canton and Beijing. In the book, “Oriental Trade Methods” one finds the following passage:

I observed that the Cantonese have been called the Irish of China. They are traditionally and by temperament against the government, against the constituted authority of Peking [Beijing]...

The Beijing government was first under Yuan Shikai and his followers who were recruited from his Beiyang Military Academy. After Yuan's death, his followers divided into several camps such as Anhui and Zhili. They were named the "Beiyang militarists". The Canton government, nominally, was under Sun Yat-sen. Without an army of its own, until 1924 when the Huangpu Military Academy was established with Soviet aid, Sun and his Canton government had to rely on the "guest armies" from neighboring provinces - the Yunnan and the Guangxi troops, all of whom proved to be ungovernable.
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