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"Part #303: Chaos With Chinese Characteristics

“JUSTICE FOR ANNAM

NO SURRENDER TO AYUTTHAI THUGS

REMEMBER GIA DINH!

WRITE TO YOUR MCP!

STOP THE KAREN MASSACRES

WHAT DOES AMBASSADOR ZHANG SAY?

Read more on Motext page 42K-112!

Paid for by the American Friends of Annamese Freedom, fully authorised and registered campaign group, registration number AF10/86210”

– Political poster seen on Gooch Street, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020

*

(Dr Wostyn’s note)

Of course, I make no apologies for selecting my particular area of interest for the next lecture recording we have digitised. In this timeline, China certainly has a larger cultural impact on the western world than what we are familiar with, yet I would say it still remains neglected in relation to its vast population and history. Furthermore, our recent focus has been on largely European (and, I suppose, American or ‘Novamundine’ as they say here) descriptions of the Black Twenties period. But China, as we saw, played a crucial role in the outbreak of that conflict and the following plague. After the beginnings of the plague pandemic, our descriptions of China – and its neighbour Siam – were few and far between. It is high time we remedy that, and I have just the lecture…

*

Recorded lecture on “The Modern History of China, Part 3” by Dr Ambrose Renfrew and Dx Xu Jingyi, recorded October 16th, 2020—

It had seemed that the 1920s dawned auspiciously for the Chinese Empire, if I can be forgiven a rather stereotypical word choice. (Laughter) To recap, following the death of Xuanming the Great in 1905, his son succeeded to the throne as the Huifu Emperor. At the time, people both inside China and beyond it wondered how he could possibly live up to the example that his father had set.

Xuanming’s reign occupied the years of the Long Peace, which in East Asian terms comes between the end of the Second Sino-Siamese War in 1871, and the outbreak of the Pandoric War in 1896. This period is almost synonymous with what is called the Weixin or Reform period, in which Xuanming and his allies, such as Wu Mengchao, sought to modernise many aspects of Chinese society and industry.[1] China – or, I should say, then, merely Feng China – had shown its superiority over the fading northern remnant of the Beiqing, but had received a rude awakening from the modernising Siamese Empire. Feng Chinese forces had lost the naval battle of Qiongzhou Strait, as well as land battles against Siam which resulted in Siam regaining lands in Tonkin at the peace treaty. Emperor Xuanming’s challenge had been to ensure that Feng China did not merely outstrip the Beiqing, but the Siamese – and stand up to Europeans and Novamundines too. This was not only achieved, but benefits of industrialisation trickled down to the common people, who obtained the use of China’s Optel network (while Lectel was reserved for government use) and whose literacy increased as education was reformed and modernised.

Under Xuanming, China also built a remarkable, but nowadays rather controversial, legacy: imperial expansion over the Himalayas into northern India. The establishment of Jushina, today’s Panchala, as a Chinese vassal state is an act that has left echoes down history to today.[2]

The great irony of Xuanming’s tenure as Emperor was that he is sometimes seen, especially by outsiders, as being defined by the two wars at the start and end of his reign – but he was undoubtedly most active during the period in between. It was his patient peacetime modernisation which led China to reap the benefits during the Pandoric War, which there is usually described through its two component conflicts involving China – the Third Sino-Siamese War and the War of Chinese Reunification. Not only did Chinese forces defeat Siam on land and sea this time and gain practically all of Tonkin as Jiaozhi Province, but when Russia desperately forced the Beiqing to join the war to shore up their position against the Americans, China took the opportunity to swiftly reconquer the rotten husk of the Beiqing regime. After almost a century of division following the Three Emperors’ War, China was finally reunified.

As Ambrose said, that was a lot for the Huifu Emperor to live up to when he came to the throne, and yet he did. Like his father, he faced a great number of challenges as soon as he ascended to power. China suffered floods and famines in 1908, and with the removal of the Beiqing as a common enemy, there was much division among political theorists and scholars about what direction the state should take.

In the aftermath of the war, Huaqiao people – overseas Chinese – began to return. Some of them had never lived in China and only barely spoke Chinese, as a second language. Some returned because they saw opportunities in the new reunited China, but many also came because of catastrophe in their united homelands, especially as chaos and then Societism spread across the Nusantara. These people were an unexpected and unpredictable element, a new spice in the bubbling stewpot of Chinese society, which was already reeling from the emergence of the Flippant youth subculture also seen elsewhere.[3]

As in Europe, common people were also beginning to assert their voice anew, with technology and new kinds of urban civilisation meaning that they were no longer cut off from the corridors of power. There remained a profound difference, which has still not entirely vanished today, between the cities and the countryside in China. Frequently, organised poor urban workers might start to gain a voice, while to the rural peasant, the only difference between him and his ancestors was that he could pay to borrow a coal-fired steam tractor for a day to supplement his water buffalo. This wasn’t always true, of course, and some influential figures – especially artists and musicians – did escape the monotony of rural agriculture to leave their mark on China. But they did so by going to the cities.

That’s right, Jingyi. Well, if the New School Confucian conservatives and isolationists had thought Xuanming was radical, they would be appalled anew by Huifu. One of his boldest reforms was to rotate the capital city between Hanjing, Nanjing, Beijing and Xi’an every six months, a way of appeasing interests that had grown resentful about power being concentrated in the south.

In time, there would be a counter-reaction against that as well, with the people of Hanjing and its surrounding provinces reviving and celebrating their Nanyue heritage, rather than regarding themselves as the true heirs of Han culture, as they had during the years of division. But that still lay in the future.

Yes. Huifu’s other major reform was the creation of the One Hundred and Eight Mandators, a demarchic random sampling of people across Chinese society. This was his attempt to plot a third way between traditional Chinese conservative ideas and those advocating European-style democracy. Most Chinese schools of thought agreed with the concept of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, that an Emperor could lose his divine mandate and that this was expressed through natural disasters as well as popular revolts. The philosophy of the Mandators was to suggest a kind of early warning system for such a loss, which would allow misconceived policy to be rethought before it was too late.

Xi Juzheng, Huifu’s ally and one of the architects of the system, explicitly compared it to the famous seismograph of Zhang Heng.[4] Just as a bronze dragon on the device might drop a ball into the mouth of a toad to indicate the direction and strength of an earthquake, discontent from a peasant reacting to a proposed policy in the Palace of the 108 could suggest the cause of a potential revolt before it broke out.

Yes. Huifu appears to have seen it as more of a symbolic rubber-stamp originally, but responded to noble complaints by forcing nobles to be part of the assembly as well. The selection was, at first, genuinely randomised. Peasant Mandators would usually be bribed to agree with state policy ninety-nine percent of the time, at least publicly, but in private might voice concerns that would be fed back to the mandarins. Their families would be exempted from taxes and subsidised for the duration of the year they served, ensuring they did not suffer from the loss of a working man. Such largesse also helped endear the Emperor across the nation in a new and concrete way, even though being selected as a Mandator was not always seen as a positive.

Huifu had also continued his father’s push for industrialisation and the construction of railways, roads, modernised canals, and other arteries for communication and transport. China’s ‘natural’ economic place in the world had always been near the top, but the empire had suffered under years of Qing decline and division, falling behind Europe’s Industrial Revolution. Now, China’s economy swelled, with some of that prosperity trickling down to the common people, especially in the large cities.

And again, more controversially, some partly attribute this influx of wealth to the mass theft of gold and jewels from Jihadi-burnt Hindu temples in Jushina by Chinese adventurers. Regardless, China’s status as an economic powerhouse was proved by the Panic of 1917. This global recession was partly kicked off when Chinese troops controversially intervened in Corea, putting down a public revolt against King Geongjong by those angry about the imprisonment of reformist politician Lee Chang-jung.[5] Overnight, China had changed the balance of power in the region, effectively booting the Russians out of their seat of influence over Corea and even the corporate possessions of Corean businessmen in Yapon and the International Guntoor Authority. The market shock from this sudden shift, coupled to the Kingdom of Guatemala defaulting on her war debt payments, destroyed the shaky remnant of the pre-Pandoric War ‘Antwerp System’ and spent the world spiralling into recession.

Though there was some economic fallout in China itself, overall the strong and largely self-sufficient Chinese economy weathered the crisis well, with state-backed Chinese business consortia acting to bail out foreign corporate entities on the verge of collapse. This saw China gaining additional influence in the Liaodong and Formosan Republics, as well as in the former ‘Senhor Oliveira’s Company’ (now renamed the Concan Confederacy) in India, and beyond. At a time when other powerful economies such as Russia, France and the ENA were using bailouts to gain influence, China was asserting her seat at the top table of world affairs.

So in the year 1919, China had a restive population coupled to a reforming Emperor, a sense of growing power tempered by a feeling that the job remained unfinished. The remaining flies in the ointment, from a nationalist perspective, was that Russia still occupied parts of Manchuria that had formerly been nominally part of their Beiqing puppet state; that the Liaodong and Formosan Republics remained formally independent; and that a further war with Siam, influenced by the Red Sash Brigade revanchists, seemed inevitable and inescapable.

That status quo would suffer two remarkable blows separated by a few years. In 1919 itself, successful French negotiation managed to defuse tensions between China and Siam, returning part of Tonkin to Siam in return for Siamese recognition of the rest remaining China’s Jiaozhi Province, and China flexing her economic muscles to Siam’s benefit. This was the Treaty of Guiling. With mutual mistrust declining, new trade links were built, which would yield a terrible, unintentional harvest as they linked certain parts of the remote Yunnan Province to the rest of the world.[6]

But we’ll get to that. France was also building alliances with the ENA and others, seeking to contain an expansionist Russia. What the French had not expected was that China, led diplomatically by Foreign Minister Ding Guoyang, Duke of Cao, had other ideas. The victory against the Beiqing in the Pandoric War, coupled to the Russians being pushed out of their position of influence in Corea, had severely tipped the balance of odds in terms of any future Russo-Chinese war. Tsar Paul was enough of a realist to realise that Russia could not possibly hope to fight China as well as the ENA and the French-led European alliance. Thus, just as France had bought Siamese neutrality against China to try to persuade China to attack Russia, Russia bought Chinese neutrality against themselves. Most of the disputed Manchurian territories were ceded to China, and Russia recognised China’s immediate annexation of the Liadong and Formosan Republics, finally returning long-lost territory to the metropole.[7]

France, the only other world power that would normally be in a position to protest, could of course scarcely do so, as she found herself dragged into what was then called the ‘Khivan War’ with a rather smaller alliance than she had thought she had. And so China secured several long-running policy goals in the matter of a handful of years, without going to battle – not with a shout, but with a sigh. If France had been the ‘Vulture’ of the Pandoric War, using her strength to remain neutral and then exploit the chaos of the postwar situation as a strong and fresh arbiter among exhausted rivals, it seemed that this title would now pass to China. The so-called Celestial Empire had gone from being the divided playground of European trade to a nation that bestrode the world like a giant.[8]

With these popular achievements, one might assume that the rule of the Huifu Emperor, and of the Feng Dynasty system, was now assured. But history is not so predictable.

Certainly, as Jingyi said earlier, China faced a number of challenges that could not be entirely brushed over by economic strength and foreign policy triumphalism – the return of many Huaqiao from the diaspora, the urban-rural divide, the continuing divisions over political ideology and questions of religious tolerance.

But the biggest factor was, of course, one which no-one saw coming. That self-same peace, those increased trade links between China and Siam, would open up the formerly isolated province of Yunnan and allow its people and goods to be traded far afield. It’s believed that the bubonic plague, known today in China as shu-yi, the Rat-sickness, had existed in natural reservoirs in Yunnan for years, perhaps even centuries. There are recorded cases of plague in Yunnan going back many years before the outbreak of the Third Plague Pandemic across the world. In 1805, shortly before his death from an earlier plague outbreak, Xu Wenxing wrote a despairing poem about it, ‘The Ballad of Dying Rats’ which begins thusly:

“Rats die to the left, to the right!
Folk would sooner see a tiger than a dying rat
For days after the rats fall
Folk join them, crumbling like a a besieged wall.
Never count the number
Of those who die before sunset!”[9]

Much like Europeans of the same era, just because the Chinese people were aware of the connection between dying rats and a plague outbreak did not mean they knew how the plague was transmitted. At the time that Xu lived, the Chinese still viewed mass disease as an act of divine judgement; in their cosmology, the Jade Emperor’s celestial government had a Ministry of Epidemics which would unleash plagues in response to sin and complacency from the people. That was a model which, in broad strokes, many mediaeval Europeans would concur with. In the age of the Enlightenment, such ideas seemed to be swept away – but Europeans were no closer to deducing the origins of diseases. Scientifically-minded savants in both Europe and China remained firmly convinced of the miasma theory of disease, albeit formulated in slightly different ways. Xu’s poem refers to ‘plague ghosts stealing souls’ as an agent of disease, not the dead rats themselves, which are seen purely as a warning and omen. Even when European doctors had suggested rats as a disease vector, many dismissed it as a cause compared to the eating of contaminated food (which can be a real cause of the plague, but in reality an extremely rare one).[10]

So plague was not known by the name shu-yi until the Black Twenties themselves, when both European and Chinese – and Novamundine – scientists finally began to unlock the secrets of how so many had died in the preceding centuries.

The first wave of the plague in China, in early 1923 by the Gregorian calendar, was by far the worst, with as many as a million deaths – the figures are disputed. This was because the seemingly minor initial outbreaks were spread across the nation, along with neighbouring Siam, by people travelling for Lunar New Year celebrations.[11] Though the rest of the Old World and the Novamund were both eventually ravaged by the plague in their turn, there was at least the fact that it burned relatively slowly across them and generally allowed some time to prepare, Ireland’s Black Homecoming aside. China, by contrast, was hit hard and all at once, in every major city and much of the countryside as well. Though China was not distracted by involvement in a global war, the nature of this first wave meant that doctors and civil servants were frequently overwhelmed.

It is still disputed in Chinese academia when the concept of quarantine first began in China. Those arguing from a Diversitarian point of view like to bring up that sufferers from earlier epidemics were told to ‘isolate’ in monasteries many hundreds of years ago, but it’s not clear whether it was recognised that it was the isolation that was preventing the disease spreading. Of course, the more obvious reason to send a patient to a monastery was because of the understanding that disease was a divine punishment for sin! Modern notions of quarantine probably did not enter China until the opening of the Feng south to Western ideas at the start of the nineteenth century.[12]

This is not to say that Western ideas of quarantine at the time were necessarily very sophisticated. The name stems from the Venetian word meaning ‘forty’, as the first quarantine – during the Black Death or the Second Plague Pandemic – was imposed on visitors to that city, sending them to an island for forty days before they were permitted to enter. Europeans’ use of quarantine was evidence-based, but not grounded in any useful scientific theory. The one advantage of the incorrect miasma theory of disease was that the same kind of isolation measures aimed at a fictional ‘bad air’ disease agent should also keep out the actual pathogens – at least, if rats and fleas could not get into the isolation zone.

Nonetheless, by the time of the first plague wave in 1923, the concept of quarantine was sufficiently well-established in China that the Huifu Emperor’s government imposed a strict quarantine between all major cities to try to slow the spread. This was of limited effectiveness at first, as the plague had largely already been spread by the Lunar New Year journeys, but did help keep individual cities plague-free once the wave had peaked and burned out there. Though faced with some mutual prejudice against each others’ work, Chinese and European (and later Novamundine) scientists did pool their resources to try to find more modern ways to fight the disease outbreak. The animalcule pathogen was identified by the Meridian Refugiado scientist in the Philippines, Miguel García, and was thus dubbed García pestis or G. pestis for short.[13] The role of rats and fleas was identified by teams working in France, Russia and China almost simultaneously, though all three faced scepticism from their colleagues at first.

Having ascertained how the disease was spread, the Huifu Emperor’s government now turned to combative measures rather than just merely control. China’s chemical industry had grown over the years, especially after the collapse of the UPSA cut off certain imports. It was now turned to the production of Vienna Green and other chemical pesticides used to kill off both rats and fleas alike.[14] After a plague vaccine was developed by Siamese scientists in 1925 (following an earlier breakthrough by the Societists), a deal was struck between China and Siam: the Siamese would share their secrets in return for China’s vast factories turning out the vaccine in huge quantities for export, as well as supplying more Vienna Green. Later, Chinese scientists also independently reverse-engineered the formula for the American rat poison Birline, whose patent was jealously guarded but which had already been stolen by Guinean agents.[15]

With vast resources, weapons with which to fight the human foe, and no distraction from war involvement, it seemed as though China was well placed to deal with the epidemic. However, it transpired that the plague would be a bigger challenge for the Huifu Emperor’s government than any expected. It also dramatically exposed the inequalities and inhomogeneities within the Chinese state, peeling back the superficial triumphs of the Feng Dynasty and revealing that there could be a rotten core within.

The divide in China was threefold: north versus south, rich versus poor, and urban versus rural. The places which fought the plague most effectively were the southern cities, especially the seaports. They had been Feng for longest, they had been exposed to European ideas enough to be comfortable with many of them (notably leading to modern sanitation and sewer systems) and they felt the most visceral yet knowing loyalty to the Emperor and the state. Ambrose, if you could bring up the map…

The capital of Hanjing, despite having many poorer suburbs, managed to eliminate the plague for the first time as early as mid-1924. Other southern coastal cities such as Fuzhou, Shantou, Quanzhou and Xiamen (or Amoy) were generally also successful in their counter-plague efforts. Things were more mixed in cities like Nanjing (or Jiangning), Wuchang, Anqing, Luoyang and Kaifeng. Chengdu, despite being less modernised than some of those cities, generally managed to control the plague well due to a combination of quarantines and somewhat reckless use of Vienna Green. Guiyang’s response was generally good on paper, but sheer geographic proximity to Yunnan (and the new roads and rail links) made it difficult for the local government to stay on top of the situation before a new group of disease vectors could arrive.

The real problems arose further north. Despite being one of the four capitals, Beijing’s modernisation was only, what is that word you use Ambrose? Scattershot. Yes. It was incomplete, and the local administration was only one generation removed from the corrupt and ineffectual Beiqing rule. Do not misunderstand, the Huifu Emperor and the Feng government had worked hard to try to bring it up to date, but inevitably not everything could be prioritised at once. For example, there was a modern sewer system, but the workers operating it were not always sufficiently well educated to understand the importance of it to the spread of disease. Things were even worse in cities like Taiyuan, Tianjin and Baoding, where there had been less incentive to modernise without the Emperor in town. Undoubtedly the worst city was Yingkou in the former Liaodong Republic, whose local population had been viewed as a source of labour, and otherwise some inconvenient background noise, by generations of French, Corean, Russian and other foreign traders seeking influence there.

The geographical divide was exacerbated by social class and education, or lack thereof. Most southerners understood that quarantine, spraying with Vienna Green and Birline, and getting vaccinated were things everyone needed to do in order to halt the spread of the plague. Northerners, by contrast, typically viewed them as purely performative acts which one might do to pay lip service if the Emperor’s representative was watching – but otherwise, why not sell the canister of Vienna Green on the black market and use the money to go drinking in an illegal bar?

This is a stereotype, as there were many ignorant and slapdash southerners (as some newspapers of the time highlight) and some conscientious and intelligent northerners, such as the great public health advocate Wang Beiling. However, this impression was the root cause of increasing division and resentment within China. The southern cities would repeatedly eradicate the plague and open up, only to face a new outbreak as people from plague-stricken northern cities entered. Internal passports had been introduced, but the endemic corruption in parts of the former Beiqing north meant that there was always someone ready to forge one.

Even when the troops were sent in to a northern city to enforce the vaccination programme, the uneducated rural peasantry – even in parts of the south – could be relied upon to spread the plague regardless. To them, plague was still very much a divine punishment and one which could only be dealt with through ritualistic prayer and offerings to Guan Yu, the God of Plague, or the Bodhisattva Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy.[16] Ironically, Guan Yu’s cult had formerly been especially popular in the southern Guandong Province, but this association with the ignorant northern peasantry sent this into decline. Indeed, it was at this time that the romantic revival of the pre-Han Nanyue identity, specifically distinguishing the southern coast from the rest of China, first began to emerge.

This southern frustration led to much of the unity which the Feng had built now beginning to crumble at the edges. Huifu’s son Zhuling, the recognised Crown Prince among his four surviving sons, had built much of his career on attempting to reintegrate the Beiqing lands into the crown. Now he worked all the harder to try to combat both the destructive ignorance and corruption of the northerners, and the resentful prejudice which the southerners directed at them. Zhuling resorted to a strikingly modern public health campaign which borrowed imagery from more traditional sources. Stories of an everyman protagonist who is shown horrific images of plague by Guanyin, who warns him to follow public health procedures rather than to pray to her, and to keep a cat to hunt rats, portrayed as an agent of heaven. For the illiterate, images of the Bodhisattva carrying a large vaccination syringe or Vienna Green canister began to appear.[17]

Another son of the Emperor who rose to particular prominence at this time was Prince Zhuzhong. More stolid and less ambitious than his brother Zhuling, Zhuzhong had served in the Imperial Army as a commander during the Pandoric War. Though young and inexperienced, he lacked the destructive arrogance and paranoid insecurity that many nobles thrust into such a position, in many nations, had felt. Zhuzhong was more than willing to defer to the advice of his mentor General (later Marshal) Liang Dezhao, and in time could step into his shoes as a capable leader in his own right.

Zhuzhong lacked political ambition and got on well with his brother, though the two disagreed on the former Beiqing northern territories. Unlike Zhuling’s compassion for the northerners, Zhuzhong had acquired a low opinion of them when he had served in the conquest of the north – especially compared to the Siamese (and the Annamese in particular) whom he respected as worthy adversaries. Zhuzhong believed the only way to rule the north was with an iron fist, that the only thing these backward, Manchu-ridden peasants would respect was force alone, and that anything more would only service the endemic corruption in the region. Some, reading stories of those sewer workers selling their Vienna Green canisters for a pittance and then spreading the plague when they were bitten by fleas, muttered that he might be right. However, Zhuzhong loyally supported his brother and father in public and never declared any such opinion in the political sphere. His views became known only through leaked letters, for he was stationed far away for most of the plague years.

From 1878 onwards, with the defeat of Tibet and Nepal, Feng China had begun pushing her influence into the northern Indian plain.[18] Remember we talked about it last time? Jushinajieluo – or just Jushina – that’s modern Panchala – came under Chinese control, and so did Delhi in time. Actually most Chinese people would say they built the Panchali state out of disparate parts and Panchala merely inherited it – but the Panchalis would disagree, as is their Diversitarian right. (Slightly nervous laughter)

Since 1890, the Tripitaka Tours Company had been bringing Chinese Buddhist pilgrims along the same route that Xuanzang had trod over a thousand years before, as immortalised – with embellishments! – by Wu Cheng’en in Journey to the West. At first, the local people (we can’t really call them Panchalis back then) welcomed Chinese rule as an island of stability after the chaos and destruction unleashed by the Great Jihad and the anarchy of its aftermath. By the 1920s, though, China had been ruling and taxing the area for almost forty years, and public resentment was starting to grow. It wouldn’t really kick off until the Thirties, but many of the Hindu spiritual fathers of the Panchali independence movement were already beginning to make themselves heard. Anyway, Prince Zhuzhong was commander of the Chinese armies of the region, which kept the peace and guarded Jushina and Delhi’s borders from encroachment by the Russians, the Bengalis, or bandits. He is generally seen as having a good understanding of the area and its culture, though again, some Panchalis would disagree. He was also known for his interest in the Kongjun, the Chinese Aero Force, which had fallen behind rivals such as Siam’s in the early twentieth century due to Xuanming Emperor’s disinterest in flight after the death of his friend Wu Mengchao in an experimental aerocraft.

As Europeans had long ago observed, the plague was no respecter of persons. Though the poor, the northern and the rural might be most at risk, the plague continued to strike among the wealthy, the southern and the urban – and, for that matter, the noble. In 1928, at a time when the plague had been almost eliminated from Europe and North America, it continued to burn at a low level in China thanks to the the north and the countryside serving as a reservoir from which it could return to strike the cities. The Huifu Emperor’s answer was simply more and more hair-trigger use of quarantine, which began to build resentment among southerners and city dwellers – and everyone, really. But 1928 was also the year when the plague slew Xi Juzheng, the Old School Confucian scholar and great friend of the Emperor, whose ideas had formed the framework for his iconic reforms such as the rotating capital city and the 108 Mandators.[19] Xi converted to Christianity on his deathbed, but many had whispered that he was a secret Christian for years, not least for his pushing for the tolerance of Christian missionaries.

Some attribute public discontent and conspiracising to this revelation about the architect of Huifu’s years in power. However, there were many other causes, most obviously resentment about the continuing plague-control measures, with no apparent end in sight. Just when China needed a charismatic leader, Huifu withdrew from society and fell sick. Though not entirely clear, it seems this was not the plague, but simply fatigue and depression from the loss of his friend and the stressful years of leading China through the dark times. To add to Xi’s death, Prince Zhuling had also fallen gravely ill with the plague, contracting it while on one of his missions to educate the northern provinces about plague control.

In this power vacuum, Foreign Minister Ding Guoyang, architect of China’s successful play of France against Russia at the start of the war, became the most powerful man in the government. However, the Duke of Cao soon found himself faced with an impossible dilemma. In February 1929, after falling into a feverish coma that most doctors thought could end only in death, Prince Zhuling made a full recovery from his near-fatal brush with the plague. However, the consequences were unexpected and drastic. Zhuling had been nursed back to help by volunteers from the north, some of whom had loudly and publicly prayed to Guan Yu and used traditional Chinese medicine. It remains hotly debated among scholars whether Zhuling was actually driven mad through brain damage during the coma, or whether he was cognisant but simply had a radical change of heart. Regardless, Zhuling now began to publicly insist that he had been wrong to propose ‘western barbarian’ sanitation, vaccination and disinfection, and advocated a return to core Chinese values and traditional cures. In June 1929, following one set of off-the-cuff remarks, a mob of peasants marched into Kaifeng and burned down a vaccination clinic, killing more than a dozen doctors and nurses. It did not help that Vienna Green actually was highly toxic to humans if misused, of course, and much misinformation about it and the vaccines spread almost as fast as the plague itself.

Foreign Minister Ding was alarmed and, after ascertaining that Zhuling could not be diverted from his new self-destructive course, strongly encouraged Huifu to change his chosen successor. However, the Emperor remained in apathetic decline and could not be persuaded to care. Ding entered into communication with Zhuzhong in Lekenao – sorry, Lucknow – using the same Photel transmissions that Zhuling, consumed by Sutcliffist fury, now wanted to ban. Sometimes he, or his supporters, even claimed that Photel masts caused the plague and burned them down! Ding’s motivation in talking to Zhuzhong was to hope that the prince could persuade either his brother to change heart or his father to care. Both proved futile in the event.

Matters came to a head in October 1929 when it was time for the capital to move to Beijing. Although the capital rotation had been cancelled and slowed during parts of the plague years, Huifu had been keen to restart it at soon as possible. However, Beijing was undergoing yet another plague outbreak, Zhuling’s destructive new rhetoric having undone much of the good he had previously achieved there. Ding ordered the process delayed until the plague had died down. Perhaps this was the final straw for the Emperor, who passed away in November at the age of sixty-two. Again, tensions mounted when a suitably grand funeral celebration and parade was scaled back due to the continuing plague risks, which the northern and southern cities blamed on each other. More mobs attacked either medical and sanitation facilities on one side, or temples to Guan Yu and Guanyin on the other. Tensions had risen to their highest since China was a divided land.

Ding and the Feng courtiers used every procedural trick they could to delay Zhuling formally coming to the throne, citing the paused rotation, the need to retrieve the tablet with Huifu’s chosen successor formally recorded, and so on. The reason for this delay became swiftly apparent in January 1930, shortly before Lunar New Year, when Zhuzhong arrived in Chengdu with the large and capable army usually stationed in Jushina, together with many Indian auxiliary troops. From Chengdu, Zhuzhong marched eastwards. Conflict seemed inevitable, with Zhuling in Beijing, Ding in Hanjing, most of the court in Xi’an where the rotation was meant to have arrived at, and Marshal Huang Mengjin mobilising his own Southern Marches army in Guiling. Open warfare had not broken out, though banditry ravaged the countryside as elements of the plague-weakened Feng state began to disintegrate. All factions began to descend on Xi’an and the court, hoping to gain legitimacy.

Using his beloved aerocraft to head there ahead of the bulk of his army, Zhuzhong arrived there first. There, lacking the men under arms to enforce his will by main force, he took a different tack. Instead, he turned to Photel and issued a speech that was circulated across the whole of China. It was immortalised years later by that song from Yu and Me – you know the one I mean! – yes – “Are We Really Going To Do This”. Well, he phrased it a bit more diplomatically than Miss Jia and her translator put it, but the core of the song is basically correct to the speech.

Zhuzhong said that the very act of impending civil war was itself the loss of the Mandate of Heaven, and thus no man alive could claim the mantle of the emperor, including himself. Rather than cost lives to fight it out, as their ancestors had, they should embrace Huifu’s innovation and use the representative body that stood for the Mandate as a whole. Chinese society would be changed forever by this speech.

For Zhuzhong called upon the 108 Mandators to elect an Emperor…






[1] See Part #263 in Volume VII.

[2] See Part #262 in Volume VII.

[3] As said in Part #263 in Volume VII, Huaqiao people were already emigrating to Feng China before the Pandoric War, although the war and its aftermath did accelerate the process.

[4] This device, properly called the Houfeng Didong Yi, dated from the second century AD, but is only known through indirect reports and later replicas.

[5] See Part #270 in Volume VII.

[6] See Part #275 in Volume VII.

[7] See Part #276 in Volume VIII.

[8] Obviously, from the perspective of OTL, it would difficult to classify China at any point of TTL as being a ‘divided playground of European trade’, but this illustrates how differently the goalposts have been set. Our China’s 19th century history, presented as a fictional story, would probably be received by the people of TTL as an unsubtle piece of racist European wish-fulfilment propaganda that unrealistically ‘lowered’ the great civilisation of China to the level of ‘backward, infighting natives’ that some other parts of the world were seen as at the time.

[9] This is closely based on an OTL poem of the same title written by Shi Daonan in 1800.

[10] The latter controversy also happened in Europe during the OTL Third Plague Pandemic.

[11] See Part #285 in Volume VIII.

[12] In OTL organised, Chinese-run quarantine institutions were first set up in China in the 1870s, after disease-control measures had been imposed on treaty ports by Western colonial powers.

[13] See Part #281 in Volume VIII.

[14] See Part #294 in Volume VIII.

[15] See Part #293 in Volume VIII.

[16] Strictly, Guan Yu (who was a general and warlord in the Three Kingdoms period before he was deified) is primarily the god of war, and secondarily of wealth, but eventually added plague to his portfolio.

[17] A very similar strategy was used in OTL by the Qing dynasty to tackle a septicaemic plague outbreak in 1910. The response was praised at the time, but the dynasty would be toppled not long afterwards.

[18] See Part #218 in Volume V.

[19] See Part #264 in Volume VII."