Ernest Morrison’s China
Morrison of Peking by Cyril Pearl deserves its place among Australian classics. The historical ironies that have gathered since the book was first published in 1967 (coincidentally at the height of China’s ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’) are evidence that it has more than one life.
George Ernest Morrison, originally of Geelong, was a characteristic late-Victorian schoolboy turned adventurer. As The Times correspondent in Peking during the Boxer rising in 1900 and the fall of the Manchu dynasty, Morrison became an authority on matters Chinese. He ended up as personal advisor to the first President of the Chinese republic – a post in which, like many a foreign expert since, he felt worse than useless.
The Manchu dynasty ended not long after the death of Ci Xi, Empress Dowager, in 1908. The Republic of China was established in 1911. The collapse of the late dynasty’s feudal despotism gave way to a period of relative openness (or submission) to the outside world. Morrison’s friend, army leader Yuan Shikai, seemed to be one of the modernisers. In the north there was talk of a constitution, democracy, and material progress in the form of foreign-developed industries, transport and communications. More stringent demands for reform pushed up from the south, linked with the name of Sun Yat Sen. But Yuan Shikai was boss in Peking. He retaliated against reformist demands by turning the embryonic constitutional government into a mockery and securing himself as dictator.
Much later in China another despot, Chairman Mao Zedong, was to be denounced. Talk of modernisation, reform and democracy would follow, and progress would be made. But the godfather of the reform program, representing an entrenched elite, would subsequently respond to pressures for further democratic reforms by showing the other side of his Janus personality. Deng Xiaoping, ‘an orthodox and narrow Stalinist bureaucrat’ in the description of Simon Leys (The Burning Forest, 1985), said in 1986 that if a state has dictatorial powers it should, on occasion, use them. He was speaking in response to student demonstrations. Three years later, in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he showed he meant what he said.
Historical parallels are never exact. Yet passages from Morrison’s copious diaries could be transcribed almost word for word by a foreign resident of China in later times.
Peking – a developing city pride – a healthier moral sense. Improvements: Roads – Police – Carriages and Building of public latrines and Rickshaws. Telephone Service, along the main roads. Prohibiting of indecent placards advertising: ‘To-make-the-penis-as-if-it-were-iron-pills’. (1906)
Peking you simply would not be able to recognise except by its monuments. Macadamised roads, electric light, great open spaces, museums, modern buildings of all kinds, one or two of them on a scale that would not be out of place in Whitehall, motor cars (there are I think at least 200 in Peking), motor cycles – more numerous than we care for, and bicycles literally by the thousand. New roads are being driven through the city, in many directions and the Imperial City Wall is now pierced in a dozen places. (1916)
The change in Peking is most marked … Of the atmosphere it is difficult to speak, but here also I feel a distinct change. They are more corrupt than ever but there seems above and outside such common delinquencies a certain public articulate opinion (from a correspondent in 1919).
And yet:
What hope is there for China? None at all. Is there any improvement? None at all. No attempt at reform. The officials in power now are as stiff-necked and reactionary as those that brought about the convulsion. The most enlightened is the most obstructive of all. He plays only for his own hand. Let the country go hang provided he makes money! (1902)
And last, from a correspondent in 1919:
I suppose it is indiscreet to say so and still more to write it, but I haven’t much faith in China.
If Morrison were alive today, his considerable vanity would be gratified by his prescience. Public toilets were renovated for the Olympics bid; billboards promoting ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ are sometimes banned; there is virtually nothing left of the Imperial City Wall, and many officials wheel and deal on the international finance market. His love of the Chinese people would be hurt by how little has changed. Despite repeated revolutionary turmoil, China has largely failed to realise the ideals of independence, prosperity and justice envisioned by her progressives a century ago.
Although a great ‘friend of China’, Morrison was not as effective in helping her as he might have wished. He felt strongly about preserving China’s sovereignty and was adamant about the Japanese threat. Expecting a German victory in the first world war, Japan had been a lukewarm ally to Britain. Morrison discovered that Japan had made secret understandings with Germany in the hope of gaining territory on continental Asia. Calling the move ‘China’s first independent participation in world politics’, and an action ‘to vindicate human rights’, Morrison pushed China into the war against Germany in order to strengthen her bargaining hand against Japan. In the event, the Versailles peace conference saw China carved up. On only one point did the ‘Big Three’, Britain, France and the United States, rebuff Japan’s demands. The white powers refused to write a recognition of national and racial equality into the treaty. Here Australia, led by Billy Hughes with his eye on White Australia, took a firm stand. In compensation for the slight, Japan was given huge territorial concessions in China. ‘Hughes, through vanity, demagogy, and stupidity, proved to be Japan’s most valuable ally.’ (Pearl) The seeds of Japanese expansionism in the second world war can be found here. Looking on, the young British diplomat Harold Nicolson, with his Bloomsbury liberalism, commented: ‘Isn’t it appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake – Isn’t it terrible, the happiness of millions being decided in this way?’
For Australians, the lesson is exemplary: a classic case of Australian grandstanding backfiring on itself. The English-speaking powers failed to analyse the Asian situation with anything like care or correctness. Morrison’s perspicacity about the position of China, Japan and South-East Asia in the cross-current of geopolitical conflict went unheeded. Yet he was The Times correspondent. He had the voice of the Thunderer. What had gone wrong?
Like many foreign correspondents, Morrison complains of inadequate support and remuneration from his paper, but his stormy relations with The Times had a more serious basis. His dispatches from China were consistently altered or cut by foreign editors who were serving home interests. The case of Morrison and The Times illustrates how, without any overt manipulation, a nexus of personalities, markets and domestic interests can seriously damage understanding between states. By virtue of its prestige, The Times had something like monopoly status in regard to inaccessible China news. This trust, if you like, was abused in the name of erroneously conceived national interests. How much greater is the power enjoyed by the The Times’s present owner, Rupert Murdoch, who has developed a many-headed relationship with China through his print, film, television and publishing interests?
History repeats. Morrison’s thumbnail sketch of the then Australian correspondent at the 1919 peace conference, in company with the ‘woefully ill-equipped’ chief cake-cutter and his white Australian stooge, makes intriguing reading today: ‘[Keith] Murdoch is a rather common ugly man, apparently on good terms with Lloyd George and Hughes, but despite his boastfulness, on terms less familiar than he had led [people] to believe – ’
Morrison’s judgment erred in his backing of military dictator Yuan Shikai as most likely ruler of a stable, modernising China. Perhaps he was dazzled by Yuan’s urbane propaganda; perhaps, after so long in China, he was too embroiled in the shadow play of Peking politics to see that elsewhere in the country were other, better alternatives. For all his unremitting scorn of British administrations, Morrison never ceased to uphold the values of the Empire, which were part of his patriotism as an Australian: anti-colonialism was unfashionable then. Mass movements that threatened imperial or monarchical structures with any resemblance to Britain’s he looked on with contempt and alarm. In China too, the Empress Dowager’s abdication had been managed by Yuan Shikai with the utmost respect for majesty. That he should in time adopt a similar imperial standing was almost inevitable. Morrison preferred such authoritarianism to forms of constitutional republicanism that depended on a wider constituency – on the grounds that the Chinese were not yet ready for democracy, a view often recycled by Chinese today. The explanation may be that Morrison favoured the Chinese arrangement that most embodied his own imperialist values: a subtle kind of racism that prevented him from allowing the workability of systems other than his own.
The West has more than once backed the wrong horse in China. Has a similar kind of self-reflectiveness operated, in which the assessment of social realities gives way to support for whichever regime can be construed as espousing one’s own values? The United States’s backing of the anti-communist Nationalist Party even after the communist victory in 1949 is one case of such blinkeredness. Another occurred when the Western Left, the ’68-ers, rallied round Chairman Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’. Then, in 1978, a more imperialist us, switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan (‘the Republic of China’) to China (‘the People’s Republic’) acceded to China’s imperialist fiction that Taiwan was part of China. Deng Xiaoping’s regime received added support for its recognition of the ‘realities’ of corporatism, entrepreneurship and market forces – from Westerners espousing such values themselves, pragmatic in the face of human rights abuses. Outsiders have been happy to forget that the reform policies rest on and serve an immovable foundation of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong-Thought, as the Chinese will openly admit.
Cyril Pearl’s biography skirts round Morrison’s contradictory racial attitudes. The man who in youth was appalled by Australia’s trade in Kanaka labour, whose deepest love was for the Chinese people, was at the same time both imperialist to his bootstraps and also overwhelmed by his pride in Australia. At the end of his life he noted that ‘the White Australia policy – the most vital and most national policy in Australia – finds support from every section of the Australian people’.
Like cultural cringe, a protean racism comes with the insecurities of Australian national identity. Cultural inferiority and its arrogant obverse issue from doubts about the validity of latter-day Australian society, which began with a bloody and protracted war between whites and blacks. The vision of a multicultural society can also be built on historical distortion. As Vietnamese-Australian writer Uyen Loewald complains: ‘Multiculturalism still means Christian or Western multiculturalism.’ To be in a position to offer compassion, to dole out help, can be another confirmation of superiority. Australians frequently extend sympathy to refugees, to victims of violently repressive regimes, to those whose homes and livelihoods are destroyed, but we can be more grudging about sharing our birthright with apolitical middle class Hong Kongers, for example, who are trying to get their families out to Australia before 1997. Pressure for immigration into Australia comes pointedly and naturally from Hong Kong, whose five million inhabitants have had little say in their fate.
China plays to Australian prejudices too. It is economically and politically backward enough to allow compassionate superiority. Most tourists are surprised to find China ‘much better’ than they expected – whatever that means. It has a culture and history of unparalleled richness, which allows a new form of cultural cringe, a mixture of mystification, misconstruction, gullibility and cynicism, arising, at bottom, from unacknowledged racism.
If a dose of medicine is taken in re-reading Morrison of Peking, the pill is also sweet. An eye for bright detail, sharp insight into the personalities behind the scenes, and sardonic humour are qualities shared by subject and biographer. Morrison’s relish for gossip is as unstinted as Pearl’s interest in it all. The final years of ill-health, tedium and frustration are sobering as Morrison is increasingly caught between his two worlds in a state of non-belonging. At the time of his death Australia had forgotten him.
It is a relief to move from the mature Morrison’s grappling with geopolitics to the young Morrison’s travel journal. At thirty-two, when he walked the 3000 miles from Shanghai to Rangoon, he was still the boy adventurer who had once walked from Normanton, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, to Melbourne. His only published book, An Australian in China, published a century ago, records his first appreciative, amused, unillusioned encounter with the civilisation that came to enthral him.
For his walk, Morrison dressed himself up as a Chinese. The traveller who ‘put his pride in his pocket and a pigtail down his back need pay only one-fourth of what it would cost him … in European dress’. He notes in his diary that ‘there was a disposition rather to laugh at me than to open the eyes of wonder … But Chinese laughter seems to be moved by different springs from ours. The Chinaman makes merry in the presence of death’. A feature of the Chinese for nineteenth-century Western observers was their cruelty – a view that perhaps resurfaces in our concern with Chinese indifference to human rights abuses. Morrison was intrigued by comparative methods of correction too, yoking China to the Antipodes when he writes:
I question if the cruelties practised in the Chinese gaols … are less endurable than the condition of things existing in English prisons so recently … there are no cruelties practised in Chinese gaols greater, even if there are any equal, to the awful and degraded brutality with which the England of our fathers treated her convicts …
Morrison was not a very good bridging person, since he lost the wavelength of what the Western powers were prepared to hear. He was a realist rather than an orientalist. Or at least, as when dressing in Chinese clothes for cheaper travel, he put on orientalist garb for pragmatic reasons. It is shocking then to encounter the lack of sentimentality with which he writes about the immigration question in his 1894 diary:
We cannot compete with Chinese; we cannot intermix or marry with them; they are aliens in language, thought, and customs … Admitted freely into Australia, the Chinese would starve out the Englishman, in accordance with the law of currency – that of two currencies in a country the baser will always supplant the better … There is not room for both in Australia. Which is to be our colonist, the Asiatic or the Englishman?
Well, there is room now, we proclaim. Some room anyway. Morrison wrote those words in the 1880s, at the height of the orientalist movement in Australia, which was also the decade of Australian nationalism, the lead-up to federation, and embryo republicanism.
Australia’s attention to Asia seems to coincide with our desire to find a new independence and identity in the world at large. As it occurred in the late 1880s and 1890s the phenomenon has too many parallels with the present for comfort if you consider how both nationalism and an open attitude to Asia were subsequently co-oped or aborted. But let’s leave the warnings for later.
Morrison was an innocent Australian then, as we no longer claim to be. His gradual loss of innocence, traced through Pearl’s biography, teaches some lessons about China, media ownership, and the handling of Asian political conflicts by Europe and the United States – and, at last, about Australia. As Morrison noted in his diary on a trip home in 1903: ‘The commonest phrase in Australia was, “Well, I don’t mind if I do.”’ Perhaps claiming a place has more to do with the claims you are prepared to make for yourself than with what the world is prepared to give you.
1987