School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemG.E. Morrison: political adviser to Yuan Shih-kái, President of the Republic of China, 1912-1916( 1975)Foreign advisers in China in the twentieth century were no new phenomenon. Ever since the West had made contact with China, certain men, often motivated by a sense of superiority and willingness to share their knowledge and expertise, saw that China stood totally isolated from the Western experience and appeared in their eyes to be backward, degenerate, weak and greatly in need of their particular assistance and guidance. As Jonathan Spence has clearly pointed out, though the sorts of foreign advisers who went to China differed considerably, most developed an emotional connection with China and, despite a lack of encouragement or even opposition, continued long in the service of the Chinese in an endeavour to raise the standards to that country to those of the Western world. George Ernest Morrison was certainly no exception as Cyril Pearl has to some extent shown in his examination of Morrison’s diaries and correspondence, Morrison was a particularly adventurous man, a person of tremendous energy and vitality, continually cognisant of China’s backwardness and the state she could, with his advice and assistance achieve. Indeed, he sustained a particularly vivid and coloured vision for the future of China. The advantage in opening out the study of Morrison in this period is twofold. In the first instance, Morrison has left to the historian a large amount of material, a collection which began with his personal diary as a schoolboy in Australia. Slicing into his papers for this period allows us to develop a reliable picture of the values, attitude and expectations of the Westerners towards China and Chinese officials, and in turn some conception of the attitude the Chinese took towards their foreign employees and Westerners in China as a whole. These attitudes very much mirror the outstanding differences between the still traditionalistic Eastern monolith and the progressive Western juggernaut. The other reason for studying Morrison is that through him we may come to a better understanding of the reasons for the failure of Yuan Shih-k’ai to build upon the 1911 revolution and to make the Chinese quasi-western political experiment a success. The established tradition of scholarship largely bulks in opposition to Yuan Shih-k’ai; he was not involved in the revolution of 1911 and the expulsion of the Manchu regime from China. Yet, once elected President of the new Republic, Yuan ousted the original revolutionaries from their place in the Republic and began to lay a careful scheme to secure himself and his descendants the next monarchy in China’s long established dynastic history. A point strongly emphasised in the traitor theory is the scheming of Yuan as, from 1913 on, he openly eliminated all political opposition to his rule. As a close contemporary of Yuan Shih-k’ai, we may see through the medium of Morrison just how Morrison personally and Westerners in China generally reacted to Yuan’s personal form of power politics.