There were other reformers in China and abroad at work from 1898 to
1911, although the western press gave no attention to the really
astonishing matter. The bitter Hunanese republican rebel, the
irrepressible Hwang Hing, was also exiled by the empress dowager,
Tse Hsi, in 1898. He fled to Japan, with a price on his head also,
and could hardly be restrained from calling the psychic moment for a
revolution into immediate declaration. He was a fast organizer, and
being nearer the ground, was in close enough touch with the Chinese of
the central provinces to be at Wuchang in October, 1911, shortly after
the first blow was struck. He had much to do with the gentry of the
Hupeh and Hunan province guilds, who largely financed and precipitated
the main revolution. Hwang is considered by the extremists of his party
as presidential timber. He is a fervent talker, and like Sun, the last
man in the world to be an opportunist, which is the great Yuan’s one
fault in the minds of many of the Chinese people. Hwang Hing is the one
reformer who has some Japanese sympathies, on account of his education
in Japan. He was born at Changsha in Hunan, where Yale College has a
branch.
In America the editors of the _Chung Sai Yat Po_, the _Chinese World_,
and _Free Press_ in San Francisco; the Chinese Students’ Club in New
York (225 East Thirty-first Street), which publishes a journal, and
the _Chinese Reform News_ in New York, often visited by Sun Yat Sen’s
American representative, Wong Man Su, ably took up the propaganda,
which was carried on in their own way by a thousand newspapers which
arose throughout China from 1906 onward, first in the treaty ports,
and later in Chinese cities, especially Canton, Hankau and Shanghai.
Much reference was made to the fact that while China, the largest
Oriental country, was without a real parliament, other Oriental
countries had successfully overthrown despotism and oligarchism, and
had popular assemblies, which granted some representation in return
for the privilege of taxation. Japan had a Diet; even black Russia had
a Duma; the Filipinos had an Assembly; Turkey had an Assembly; little
Persia had a representative Mejliss; native members had at last been
admitted into the Viceroy’s Council in India; and Hongkong, with its
500,000 Chinese had long had two Chinese as brilliant members of the
Legislative Council.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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