FROM HARBIN I took the train to Hsingking, after mailing home those photographs of the Trans-Siberian smash whose publication would, I sincerely hoped, lead to some wholesale dismissals in the Russian customs service.
Hsingking is the new capital of Manchukuo, and incidentally the youngest capital city in the world. Capitals in China have always been highly movable, and the Japanese had plenty of precedent for shifting the seat of government from Mukden to a place which, in addition to being more geographically central, was uncontaminated by relics of the Young Marshal’s evil influences. They chose Hsingking, formerly Chanchun, and in those days important only because it marked the junction of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchurian Railway. I had passed through Chanchun two years ago, when it was full of Japanese reinforcements for the invasion which had just been launched.
At the time of my second visit, Hsingking had hardly adapted itself to the greatness so suddenly thrust upon it. It is a small town, of which the central part, focused round the railway station, has that symmetrical, sanitary, and entirely characterless appearance imposed by Japanese influence on all towns in the Railway Zone. The outskirts are more haphazard and Chinese. A sparse traffic of droshkies, rickshaws, and government officials’ cars raises dense clouds of dust in streets which belong neither to the East nor to the West. There is a small hotel, run by the South Manchurian Railway and, like everything Japanese, admirably clean and tidy. I was lucky to get a room there, for the place is full of homeless officials, and most visitors are exiled to the Railway Hotel. The Railway Hotel is so-called for the best of reasons. It consists of a string of sleepers in a siding.
Hsingking was used to Special Correspondents. Members of that overrated profession had been indeed almost its only foreign visitors. Firmly but courteously I was launched upon a round of interviews. For three days I interviewed people without stopping.
The procedure was monotonous and unreal. You picked up an interpreter from the Foreign Office and drove round to keep your appointment. The Government departments were poorly housed as yet, and your Chinese Minister would be found lurking in the recesses of a former school or office buildings. He received you with the utmost courtesy, bowing ceremoniously in his long silk robe. Tea was produced, and cigarettes. In blackwood chairs you sat and smiled at each other.
He was the Minister of State for this or that. But in one corner of the room sat a clerk who took down a verbatim report of the interview, for submission presumably to the powers behind that throne of which the Minister was, on paper, the representative. So it behoved the Minister to be guarded in his speech. And even if he was not – even if he forgot (or should it be remembered?) himself and was prompted by a lucky shot to indiscretion – it did not help you much. For there at your side was the interpreter, and he could ensure that whatever information reached you consisted only of the official facts, garnished with the right official flavour. Quite soon I decided that interviews were a waste of time.
One of them, however, was not. I was granted an audience by His Excellency Henry Pu Yi, Chief Executive of the State of Manchukuo, and to-day its Emperor. Mr. Pu Yi – as the newspapers, those harbingers of disenchantment, insist on calling him – is the heir to the Dragon Throne of the Manchu dynasty. He ascended it in 1908, at the age of three and at the wish of that fantastic character, the Empress Dowager. She died on the day after his enthronement. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in 1912 the child was forced to abdicate. The last representative of the Manchu dynasty withdrew to Jehol.
In 1917 he was back on the throne, but only for a week; the restoration movement fizzled out. In 1924 his palace in Peking was invaded by the troops of Feng Yu-hsian, the ‘Christian General’, and the boy’s life was only saved by the resource of Sir Reginald Johnston, his tutor, who smuggled him into the Legation Quarter. Most unfairly deprived, by now, of the privileges which had been granted him under the treaty of abdication, the ex-Emperor slipped out of Peking and took refuge in the Japanese Concession at Tientsin. Here he remained until a figurehead was required for the alleged autonomy movement in Manchuria. In 1932, nominally by the will of thirty million people, actually by a shrewd stroke of Japanese foreign policy, he became the titular ruler of Manchukuo. In 1934 they made him Emperor.
The temporary palace was the former offices of the Salt Gabelle. The Chinese soldiers on guard at the gate wore smarter uniforms than usual; they were armed with new Japanese service rifles, which are easily recognized because there is no outward and visible sign of a magazine. In the outer courtyard an aged general was wandering about. He had a straggling white beard and the air of an El Greco minor prophet. He seemed to be at a loose end.
I sent in my card and was presently ushered with an interpreter into an ante-room. This was full of Chinese officers of the Manchukuo1 army, with a sprinkling of Japanese. One of these, an A.D.C., took over the duties of my interpreter during the audience.
While we waited, I asked him whether I ought to address the Chief Executive as Your Excellency or Your Majesty. He said he was not sure; Manchukuo was as yet without a constitution, and its officials were often embarrassed by the questions of foreign visitors who, with their usual passion for labels, wanted to know whether it was a monarchy or a republic or an oligarchy or what? On the whole he thought Your Excellency would meet the present case.
Eventually we were summoned, and made our way up a narrow staircase into a large, parlour-like room, furnished in the European style, and having a markedly uninhabited air.
Mr. Pu Yi received us alone. He is a tall young man of twenty-nine, much better-looking and more alert than you would suppose from his photographs, which invariably credit him with a dazed and rather tortoise-like appearance. He has very fine hands and a charming smile. He was wearing dark glasses, a well-cut frock-coat, a white waistcoat, and spats. All three of us bowed and smiled a great deal, and then sat down.
This time, if there was anybody taking notes of the interview, they were out of sight. His Excellency understands English, and I suspect speaks it as well; but he prefers to give audience through an interpreter. The audience began.
It lasted half an hour. I asked the inevitable questions, which it would have been unseemly to omit. They were beginning to sound pretty futile to me.
They were broad questions on political matters, and the answer to all of them turned out – not at all to my surprise – to be ‘Wangtao’.
During the last few days the word had been often in my ears. Wangtao means the Principle of Benevolent Rule. It was found as a formula, and has remained as a gag. The more specific, the more awkward the questions you asked, the more certain you were to get Wangtao for an answer. …
‘Was it not true that the Government, under the pretence of suppressing the cultivation and sale of opium, had in fact turned it into a profitable state monopoly?’
‘Wangtao.’
‘Had not the use of bombers on anti-bandit operations resulted in the destruction of much innocent life and property?’
‘Wangtao.’
They answered, of course, at much greater length. It took a certain amount of circumlocution to lead you round the point. But the destination at which you finally arrived was always the same: Wangtao.
With His Excellency, needless to say, I raised no such uncomfortably controversial issues as the above. After a few Wangtaos had cleared the air we passed from high politics to the personal. Did His Excellency ever broadcast to his people, as our King had recently? Yes, he had, once; he would like to do it again. He had a great admiration for the King of England, who had once sent him a signed photograph. Did His Excellency contemplate becoming Emperor? (This was six months before the announcement was made.) His Excellency said that he would do whatever was thought best for his people.
I felt that we were slipping back to the Wangtao gambit. I tried a long shot, reasoning that even potential Emperors must like to talk about themselves. I asked His Excellency which had been the happiest time in his life – the old days in the Forbidden City in Peking, or his untroubled exile in the Foreign Concession at Tientsin, or the present, when he was back in the saddle again?
His Excellency, with a delightful smile, replied at length. The interpreter began to translate. ‘His Excellency says that so long as you feel benevolent towards everyone – so long as you practise the principle of Wangtao – happiness is surely only a question of. …’ He droned on.
The formula had been rediscovered. Very soon I took my leave.
I often think of Mr. Pu Yi, that charming though reticent young man. He is surely the most romantic of the rulers of this world. The strong men in funny shirts: the dim presidents in top hats: Moscow’s grubby Jews in 1910 Rolls-Royces: the rajahs and the emirs and the shahs, the big kings and the little kings – all these we have seen before. We have got used to them. They are no longer very remarkable. The relations between a man and his throne do not now excite in us that agonizing curiosity which they excited in Shakespeare. Perhaps democracy is to blame. We have found out how dull it is to rule ourselves; we are the less concerned to know what it feels like to rule others.
But Mr, Pu Yi is a new line in rulers. Disinherited from an Empire, he now finds himself the nominal head of a new state which once formed part of that Empire. He is a figurehead, owing his position to an alien and – for most of his fellow-countrymen – a hated race. All round him they are busy working out the destinies of his people: little brown men in khaki, little brown men in frock-coats, very serious, very methodical, very energetic. Officially their actions are an expression of his will, officially he is the master. But actually he is at best no more than a privileged spectator. He cannot be unconscious of the fact.
What does he feel, as he watches them at work? What does he feel, as he signs state papers on the dotted line and lays foundation stones and speaks by rote on great occasions?
I often wonder.
I was not sorry to leave Hsingking. The atmosphere of that capital is too thick with humbug for comfort. The conscientious journalist will hardly escape that affliction which is now known among the correspondents in Manchuria as Fleming’s Disease, or Propaganda Elbow. Every time you visit an official he gives you, on parting, a small ass-load of pamphlets, tracts and proclamations. Propaganda Elbow is contracted from carrying this vast and unwieldy bundle back to your hotel. You cannot leave it in a taxi, for there are no taxis in Hsingking. You cannot drop it, unnoticed, in the street. You must lug it dutifully home.
It proves to be heavy stuff in more senses than one. The Japanese are not very good at propaganda, and they go in for it far too much. Few will be interested, none will be convinced, by those interminable protestations of altruism, those laborious attempts to prove (for instance) that all the thirty million inhabitants of Manchukuo are really Manchus by birth, or that every individual who wrote an anti-Japanese letter to the Lytton Commission was in the pay of the Young Marshal.
After reading a few kilogrammes of the publications of the Ministry of Information and Publicity I lost patience with the stuff. The Japanese, I reflected, are doing what is, taken by and large, good work in Manchuria.2 And even if it was not good work, no one is going to stop them from doing it. This being so, why this perpetual gilding of the lily? Why these everlasting and redundant attempts to pass off a policy of enlightened exploitation as a piece of disinterested rescue-work? This parading of non-existent virtues, this interminable process of self-vindication, breeds doubt and scepticism in the foreign observer. His reactions are the obvious ones. ‘Why,’ he says, ‘are these chaps so terribly anxious to appear, not merely reasonably decent, but extravagantly quixotic? I don’t like all this eyewash.’ And next time he meets an official, full of the usual evasions and the usual overstatements, he decides that the Japanese are a race of liars and not to be trusted a yard.
The truth is, I think, that this frantic and misguided insistence on propaganda has its roots in an inferiority complex. The unsubtle western methods of propaganda are a game to which, like many other games, the Japanese are new. Behind their sturdy bluster they are shy and uncertain of themselves. Their lack of inner confidence is expressed in the usual way. They play the new game too hard and too seriously. They overdo it. They protest too much.
Looking through those pamphlets and proclamations, with their stiff portentous phraseology, I wished for a moment that the rulers of Manchukuo had broken with the hackneyed technique of modern diplomacy – that they had ceased to ‘view with grave concern’, to ‘confess themselves at a loss to understand’; I wished it was not typical of the new state that her genesis – the military invasion of Manchuria – was still invariably referred to as The Incident. In the old days the rulers of the world were not so mealy-mouthed; they did quite often say what they meant. And they sometimes said it with humour. They knew the power of a joke. The French Dauphin sent tennis balls to the English King; and it is significant that the scene in which they are delivered is the only one in Shakespeare’s play in which Henry V appears, for a moment, at a disadvantage.
Laughter is a strong weapon, because it is incalculable and there is no defence against it. But in diplomacy the weapon has long been voluntarily discarded. It is a sad pity; a Strong Note would be all the stronger for the infusion of a little mockery. But no: we must be slavishly formal, we must go on rumbling at each other in the old pompous jargon of which every phrase has the polished stiffness, the bulky complacence, of Victorian furniture.
It is too late, now, for us to escape from those conventions. But Manchukuo, need never have submitted to them. The other nations cold-shouldered her, ignored her existence. She had every excuse for taking a line of her own, and humour is a line well worth trying. When called to order she should have cocked a snook. She should have conducted her correspondence with foreign powers on picture postcards, or in verse, or not at all. If she had sent (say) an enormous sturgeon to the Secretary General of the League every day for a month he would, I think, have become uneasy in his mind, and Manchukuo might have stood a better chance at Geneva.
But the rulers of the new state are the Japanese. They toed the line. They stuck to long and disingenuous communications, couched in frock-coated prose.
They threw away a big chance, I think.
1 This force, which numbered at that time about 120,000 men, must not be confused with the Kuantung Army, which is the Japanese army of occupation and consisted then of rather more than five divisions of regulars at peace strength (10,000 men to a division). The Japanese have no great faith in the Manchukuo troops, among whom an hereditary tendency to regard the bandits as allies rather than enemies has yet to be completely eliminated.
2 They have, for instance, stabilized the currency; an inestimable blessing to a country formerly flooded with worthless paper money by the war-lords.