Aug. 25, 2025
During his five-year absence from North America, Kang’s many deputies traveled widely, leaving new Baohuanghui chapters in their wake. Along with chapters founded on the initiative of local Chinese, Kang’s party enjoyed “a period of phenomenal expansion,” especially between and , as the reformists outstripped the revolutionaries in their contest for support.3 This strategy of building a party from the grass roots resembled a Western political campaign in which a candidate’s “surrogates” do the legwork with local community leaders. It proved so successful for Kang that Sun later imitated it with his own political organization, the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance). Kang’s precursors were of such importance in developing the Baohuanghui and in personifying the reform movement for North Americans that their organizing tours in the United States are treated in some detail below.4
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Most of Kang’s organizers were his former students, personally and ideologically close to him and trusted to transmit the reform message with both passion and fidelity to Kang’s platform. In only a few cases were newer followers from overseas Chinese communities sent into the field, and these were generally men whom Kang had personally come to know well, although they never earned the same trust as he bestowed on his students.
The first and one of the most indefatigable of Kang’s deputies was Liang Qitian, Liang Qichao’s cousin and one of his “sworn brotherhood” in Japan who had tilted toward revolution. He spent four years organizing and reviving Baohuanghui chapters in North, Central, and South America. Liang arrived in Canada in March , was reported to be in Portland in July and San Francisco in August before traveling widely in the United States. He went to Mexico sometime before June and probably visited countries in Central and South America before returning to the United States. Liang made a second trip to Mexico, Central, and South America in followed by a second tour of the United States. That year, he was reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to be the vice president of the Baohuanghui’s Mexico City chapter, and “when his work of organizing societies in the republic [of Mexico] is well-advanced, he will go to Europe, where he will continue the reform movement.”5 There is no evidence he went to Europe, or visited any Baohuanghui chapters established on the continent, but Liang was as much in demand at the end of his journey as when it commenced. On January 2, , Liang spoke at the dedication of the Los Angeles Baohuanghui office and took the overnight train to Marysville, an important commercial center in California’s central valley whose population was one-quarter Chinese. He was met by ten carriages and a brass band and wrote his classmate Tom Leung in Los Angeles, “Our comrades wearing the badges of our association were waiting solemnly … A sea of Westerners from all over were watching. Receiving such warm and honorable treatment, I was moved and ashamed.”6 Liang asked Tom to send several copies of the Los Angeles chapter’s charter to Marysville to use as a model. A month later, the Hawaiian Star noted Liang’s passage back to Asia via Honolulu, and he became a key figure at the Baohuanghui headquarters and an officer in the Commercial Corporation in Hong Kong.7
Liang’s first trip to the United States came during a time of high tension between the Qing government and the Baohuanghui. In Canada Liang had been raising funds from Baohuanghui members for the Qinwang uprising to restore Guangxu to his throne (see Chapter 4). The New-York Tribune reported that Liang’s speech in Portland on July 30, , blamed Cixi for “intriguing with the Boxers instead of putting down the rebels.” A separate news dispatch revealed Baohuanghui plans to take advantage of the invading Allies during the Boxer uprising:There sailed yesterday from Vancouver on the steamer Empress of India fifty prominent Chinese reformers from New York and Boston, twenty from Seattle and thirty from Vancouver, all bound for Macao and all wearing conspicuously displayed a button photograph of their Emperor, Kwang Su. The Chinese Empire Reform Association of the World had received a cable dispatch in cipher from its leader, Kwang Yu Wie, instructing the association to send the leading members to Macao at once, where a council of war will be held to consider ways of raising an army among the members of the association to support the allied Powers.8
Wu Tingfang, the ever-vigilant Chinese minister in Washington, DC, notified the U.S. State Department about Liang’s presence and activities in the United States. As a result, when Liang arrived in San Francisco on August 27, , Collector of Customs John P. Jackson investigated and reported to the Treasury Department that, upon having located Liang, he determined that “no action” should be taken against him because “notoriety is just what he wants and I will not aid him in his designs,” and, furthermore, he hadn’t violated the law. Jackson’s report was forwarded to the State Department for consideration.9
Liang was a suitable envoy for Kang, as pictured in a full-page story in the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Call a few days after his arrival—a dignified young man in black skullcap and long scholar’s robes studded with buttons from various Baohuanghui chapters around the world.10 Accompanied by a Canadian Chinese who acted as English-language interpreter and political attaché, Liang’s style of travel set the pattern for subsequent Baohuanghui itinerants, blending organization and propaganda work with enthusiastic tourism and detailed observation and reports on anything that could be applicable for exploitation or imitation by the reformers. Liang, in a boast that could not be disproved, presented himself to the Call reporter as “the only visitor to this shore who has known or even seen the Emperor, Kwang Hsu … Certainly Leung Kai Tin is THE most remarkable Chinaman who has ever visited San Francisco.” Liang told the Call that “I was a student of Kang Yu Wei, and one of the scholars whom the Emperor gathered about him during his six months of busy reform.” He claimed also that he carried letters between the reformers and the emperor when meetings were no longer possible. In fact, during the Hundred Days, it is unlikely Liang Qitian was in Beijing at all, and only Kang and Liang Qichao had personal audiences with Guangxu. But, as Liang Qichao’s cousin and comrade in arms in Japan, Liang Qitian was certainly the first Chinese to visit North America with a close second-hand account of the reformers’ role in the events.11
In his first speech to San Francisco Chinese on September 2, covered by the Call, Liang fulsomely pled the case for supporting the emperor and shed tears for the plight of “the first honest Emperor with which the Creator has blessed China for thousands of years … Do you know, men of China, that the father of us all is at this moment a prisoner? Do you realize that this great and good man is suffering for us?” As the audience wept, Liang changed his tone: “Do not weep, my brothers … Liberty and reform will soon be ours.” He then introduced a theme that Kang and many others would echo, the inspiration of the American Revolution and democracy for China:All will soon be changed and the regeneration of China will follow. The inspiration comes from the land of glorious liberty (America), whose hospitality you now enjoy; the land of the flowery banner whose sons were the first great reformers. The immortal father of their country, Washington, has not only liberated Americans, but the history of his deeds is now reforming China.12
Liang Qitian was a prodigious organizer for the Baohuanghui, traveling far beyond cities and larger towns to mining and fishing villages of Montana and the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho), where Liang Qichao later reported thirty-eight chapters by ‒4.13 In towns where enthusiasm for reform was flagging or membership stagnant, Liang apparently revived chapters and expanded membership.14 Like Kang, Liang apparently reveled in tourism. He and his interpreter Gong Hee were thought to be “the first tourists of their race” in Yellowstone Park and sent a bound, rice-paper Chinese book illustrated with their photographs and hand-drawn maps of the park to the corporate headquarters of the Northern Pacific Railroad.15
Liang’s travels in Latin America will be recounted in Chapter 8, but he appears to have been the first of Kang’s disciples to investigate Mexican business opportunities. In June , he wrote Tom Leung to entice Tom to invest in a land-buying pool that would engage in farming before selling the land at a tremendous profit.16 He also asked Tom to recruit “an agricultural expert” who could look into raising silkworms on the plentiful mulberry trees, because “Mexican people are crazy about Chinese silk goods,” and, with Mexico’s heavy levies on silk goods, “we will be able to make a great profit.” In the same letter, Liang said he had traveled to thirteen cities for the Baohuanghui and that the association had been established in Torreón under the initiative of the wealthy landowner and merchant Wong Foon Chuck (Huang Kuanzhuo), who had offered to hire one of Kang’s students as a speaker for the association and pay him $1,000 and expenses.
Xu Qin (Xu Junmian, Xue’an, Xu Shiqin or Su Shih Chin, Choy So Kan) left his post as principal of the Datong School in Yokohama to join his classmate Liang Qitian in North America in May . Xu was one of Kang’s first students, and his commitment to Kang was shown as early as the s when he used his family fortune to pay rent for Kang’s school and subsidize the publication of Kang’s books. When Kang fled China, he turned to Xu to look after his family.17 Described by others as the disciple most trusted by Kang, the reliable and loyal—as well as fearlessly blunt—Xu would be tapped to wrangle with the Baohuanghui’s most challenging organizing tasks, traveling almost continuously on Kang’s behalf until .18
Xu Qin arrived in San Francisco on the City of Peking on May 31, , to be greeted at the dock by Consul General He You, who believed that Xu was an official sent by China’s government to study in the United States.19 When a Chinese newspaper exposed Xu as “a revolutionist,” the consul general and Chinese Minister Wu Tingfang were outraged at being deceived and protested to U.S. authorities, all the way to the secretary of the treasury, accusing Xu of bearing a fraudulent Section 6 certificate and demanding that he be deported under Chinese exclusion laws.20 Xu was arrested and “assigned quarters in the County Jail as a Federal prisoner.”21 The Baohuanghui rallied behind Xu, led by Tang Qiongchang (Tong Kai Chong, Tong King Chung) in San Francisco, whose own relatives in China had been jailed by Qing authorities after Consul General He You reported on Tang’s political activities in the United States.22 American attorneys were hired to defend Xu in court, and another American whom the members called “Ban Na” was deputized by the Baohuanghui to go to Washington and follow up Xu’s case with President William McKinley.23 McKinley had visited San Francisco earlier in May and had met Tang and two other San Francisco chapter leaders. They presented him with a pair of curtains embroidered with life-size peacocks and expressed the association’s gratitude for American forbearance during the Boxer uprising: “We feel that it was you, and you alone, of all the rulers of the great nations, who had the courage to say a kind word for the helpless subjects of our beloved Emperor, Kwang Hsu, and at a time, too, when all Europe stood ready to apportion ancient China as might best satisfy their greed.”24 Mr. “Ban Na” described his meetings with McKinley to the San Francisco chapter, saying that McKinley “had long admired the members of the association, and he knew that what they did was actually what patriotic citizens did—what was righteous and just.” As for Xu, “Ban Na” wrote that McKinley “would like to see him stay in the United States to observe our democracy so that one day it might be adopted by China. He said that if [Xu’s] passport has a problem, he would consider Mr. Xu a political prisoner and allow him to stay in America under special protection.” On July 6, , the San Francisco Call reported: “Su Shih Chin, a proscribed enemy of the Dowager Empress of China, was admitted to this country yesterday by order of the Secretary of the Treasury,” who “decided that this Government could not debar Chinese immigrants of the favored classes because of political offenses.”25 Xu thus began his American tour as something of a celebrity with his plight and cause given extensive coverage in the American press and was the beneficiary of both American patronage and American legal justice (he had been released from jail after only a few days thanks to his lawyers’ habeas corpus appeal).
Qing officials would never again embarrass themselves by such public protests against the visiting reformers. Records show in that China’s new minister, Liang Cheng (Liang Zhendong, Chentung Liang Cheng, Liang Pixu), asked the Department of State to exclude Liang Qichao, but for a reason not evident in these documents, Liang was able to enter unobstructed.26 Furthermore, around this time, reform-minded Qing officials and Manchu princes visiting North America began to engage in regular interchange with Baohuanghui members and openly express their support. In the midst of his American tour, Liang Qichao told the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “While we were in Washington the whole of the Chinese Legation used to come see us every evening, including the Chinese Minister, and they were all very interested in our work.”27 Chinese Minister Liang Cheng was certainly sympathetic to, if not on occasion directly allied with, the Baohuanghui, on such issues as opposing the Exclusion policies. This reflected both the easing of Qing hostilities toward the Baohuanghui after the inauguration of Cixi’s New Policies (Xinzheng) as well as Liang Cheng’s personal history as an Americanized, English-speaking alumnus of Yung Wing’s Chinese Educational Mission.28
Another positive change for the Baohuanghui was the new Guangdong Governor General Tao Mo, who ignored San Francisco Consul He You’s telegram asking him to arrest the family of Xu Qin.29 Tao also released from prison the families of Luo Botang and Tang Qiongchang, the San Francisco Baohuanghui activists who had been promoting and fundraising for Qinwang. Kang Youwei wrote members in August that Governor General Tao had said openly that Xu, Luo, and Tang were “trying to protect the emperor; they were not protecting thieves and bandits. If people tried to protect the emperor and their families must be arrested, what about those who protect the thieves? … As a result, our comrades will be more courageous and enthusiastic because they do not have to worry about their families.”
Kang’s most unusual precursor was his second daughter, the charismatic and adventurous Kang Tongbi.30 Kang sent her off from India with these verses:
Thousands of miles to America and Europe A young girl makes the trip alone. Do I not have compassion on you? But I cannot help having pity on all living beings … An initial step toward women’s rights— A great task you now undertake. ‘People’s rights’ is a universal principle; Constitutional government is truly an excellent plan; These are timely panaceas— Proposals that can really save the country. Clearly will you enunciate my aim, And with zeal carry out the mission.31Kang depended on Tongbi as his most constant companion in exile, with his wives and mother ensconced in Macau and Tongbi’s older sister Tongwei a married woman by . Tongbi often served as Kang’s interpreter as well as his personal and scholarly assistant. When she arrived in North America, she was, by any standard, a precociously modern Chinese woman who must have seemed no less intrepid and sophisticated to the wives of wealthy Chinese merchants, her peers in North America, as to American observers. Unlike her peers, Tongbi walked (and rode horses and test fired a machine gun) unhampered by bound feet; she arrived speaking English reasonably well (and was literate in Japanese and Sanskrit); she had traveled widely and at times on her own; and she easily took on the role as public representative of the Chinese reform movement.32 As with his other daughters, Kang wanted Tongbi to receive a foreign education.33 However, because he also needed her help as a political organizer and a travel escort, it took Tongbi four years of preparation to be admitted to college and once there she was granted status as a “special student,” receiving an honorary college degree.34 Tongbi’s public speeches, sense of fashion, and eloquence in newspaper interviews kept her in the American press throughout her stay (–9). She studied first in Hartford, Connecticut—Lords Hill School for Girls and Hartford High School, as well as with private tutors—and then in New York City at Barnard College. Tongbi’s presence on the East Coast was likely one reason that Kang Youwei would return several times to that part of the United States.35
Stirred by her imminent entry into the realm of politics, Kang Tongbi wrote these words before setting sail from Japan to Canada:
In study, I should not be bound by formalities, But aspire to improve my people’s lives. The Universal Principles36 inherited through my family must surge forward, So the blood of our martyrs will not have been shed in vain.37 The gist of Tongbi’s reform message was similar to that of her father’s. Beyond her father’s nebulous goal of “an initial step toward women’s rights” was her hope that Chinese women would join the movement, first by modernizing their own families, and then through teaching others to do the same. She could hardly have been uninfluenced by her father’s famous work, Datong Shu (Book of Great Community), which he had completed when they lived together in India in . Among his basic premises was that to achieve unity, certain “barriers of suffering” must be eradicated to achieve “one world.” In Kang’s utopia, the barriers between men and women would disappear entirely:Kang’s criticisms of “sex boundaries” and “family boundaries”—two major sources of suffering—were very severe. “His views in these connections were, at the time he expressed them, by far the most novel and provocative.”39 He wrote impassionedly on the status of women in Datong Shu:The men and women of One World are entirely equal. Through the abolishment of the family, women are no longer burdened with the age-old duties of caring for children, nor are they merely playthings for men. There being no essential differences between men and women as human beings, women are not regarded any differently than men when it comes to work or to holding office.38
Now for ten and some thousand years and in all the countries of the globe, incalculable, inconceivable numbers of beings who have all alike had human forms, have all alike had human intelligence, who have all been in intimate relation with and loved by men, have been callously and unscrupulously repressed, restrained, kept in ignorance, shut up, imprisoned, and shackled by [these same men]—prevented by men from attaining independence, from taking part in public affairs, from becoming officials, from being citizens, from participating in public assemblies; still worse, from doing scholarly work, from voicing their opinions, from having their names heard by others, from free social intercourse,… from [even] leaving the house; and still worse, [forced by men] to bind and constrict their waists, to veil their faces, to deform their feet, to tattoo their bodies …40
The influence of such ideas is shown by Kang Tongbi’s advocacy of the emancipation of women when she began an independent life in North America.41 Tongbi arrived in Canada on May, 7 .42 Her lectures on reform in Victoria and Vancouver were “the first occasion on which any Chinese woman has been known to speak in public.”43 She also organized the first chapters of the Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association (Baohuangnühui or Baojiu Da-Qing Guangxu Huangdi Nühui)—in effect a Baohuanghui women’s auxiliary, with chapters in Canada, Hawaiʻi, and the United States.44 Verified chapters were in three cities in British Columbia: Vancouver, Victoria, New Westminster (chapter shared with Vancouver); and nine in the United States and Hawaiʻi: Seattle, Portland, Astoria (Oregon), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, and Honolulu, according to Zhongping Chen.45 When Liang Qichao and Kang Tongbi visited Astoria in September , accompanied by women’s association leaders from Vancouver and Seattle, Tongbi recruited the ten Chinese women in town to form a local chapter and raised $600 for the Guangdong Public School that Liang was promoting and, at the insistence of the women members, had agreed would enroll girls.46
There were Chinese feminists in cities that Tongbi did not visit who took on the task of founding women’s associations under her remote guidance. The Honolulu chapter was begun by an elementary school teacher, He Huizhen (Fui Jin Ho), who had been immortalized in a twenty-four-poem cycle by Liang Qichao after He served as his interpreter and translator during his six-month stay in Honolulu in –. Working face to face “deep into the night” translating Liang’s writings, He and Liang may have become romantically involved. Liang was as impressed with He as she no doubt was with him. In his poem cycle published in Qingyi Bao, Liang wrote that “two hundred million [women of China] must bow their heads [to Miss He]” and “women’s equal rights have arrived in Honolulu.”47 He’s letters to Tongbi in late and early acknowledge not only that there was resistance to a reformist women’s association from the largely uneducated and conservative female population in Honolulu but also opposition from the revolutionaries in that city, where Sun Yatsen had many followers. He wrote in English to Tongbi:48I have organized a society for our sisters in Honolulu, and am glad to inform you I am doing very well. At first people have so much to say against us, but now they saw our object of our aims. I know not whether you have seen our by-laws in Sun Chung Kwock Bow [Sun Chung Kwok Bo, Xin Zhongguo Bao] some time ago. Would you like to have me send a copy to you? I thank you very much in sending me your rules for your society. It is very well done, but I have to [start] from little at a time … We named our society Hua Nü Hequn [Chinese Women Coming Together in a Group].
How often do you meet and where do you hold your meeting? Do you have regular program for the meeting? What topic have you taken up lately? …
When I first organize [sic] this society, both men and women said all kinds of badness against us. They did not want women to be so progressive. I started with a few, and I gave them lecture concerning our object of forming this society and I had the constitution published in the newspaper. Now I’m glad to inform you that I have about forty members. Several American women joined it. My aim is, if we save enough money I would like very much to open a school for women. Knowledge brings happiness.
On August 20, , Tongbi crossed the Canadian border at Port Townsend, Washington, identified as a scholar whose last place of residence was India. She was escorted by Vancouver Baohuanghui leader Charlie Yip Yen (Ye En).49 According to an article datelined Tacoma, Washington, August 24, she had earlier “established twelve lodges of the Woman’s Chinese Reform Association, three of them being in Canada.”50 In Seattle, Tongbi joined Liang Qichao’s entourage for about three weeks, at the end of Liang’s long organizing tour of the eastern and central United States.51 With his broad experience in Australia, Hawaiʻi, Southeast Asia, and now North America, Liang must have been a welcome guide for Tongbi to Chinatown politics and Baohuanghui organizational practices, many of which he himself undoubtedly originated or refined (see below).52
Although few details exist about the activities of the Ladies Association chapters, the New-York Tribune reported on the New York City chapter a day after its founding on October 20, . It noted that “the presence of so many women [thirty-four] on such an occasion really marked an epoch in the annals of Chinatown, as it is not considered at all ‘seemly for our women to be seen in public,’ as a member of the reform association explained.”53 After an “impassioned, patriotic” speech by Kang Tongbi, officers were elected, and, like the British Columbia chapters, many of the members were wives of local Baohuanghui leaders. Tongbi told the Tribune “in pretty broken English”: “I want them to read papers … I want them to know things. I want them to help to make things go right and to have grand education.” As she would frequently repeat, “Why should not we women stand together and help each other?” Tongbi’s message was fortified throughout her American stay. Before leaving the United States in , she told a newspaper reporter:It is the American women’s club that will give the open door to the women of China … Organization—that is the big lesson I have learned in America. Only American women and girls could teach it to me. It leads the way to more effectual accomplishment than anything else in the world. That is why I choose it to accomplish my purpose, and that is why I know I shall succeed.54
Kang Tongbi’s feminist sensibilities were always on alert, and she asserted herself as an independent woman, even after she became a student. Tongbi’s feminism is observed from her own perspective from a three-week-long fragment of her diary (June 17–July 10, ), when she made an excursion from Hartford to St. Louis, Missouri.55 Tongbi traveled first to New York City, where she was hosted at the West 86th Street home of an American friend, Pansy Mason, and her family. The Masons were China missionaries, whom Tongbi had met in in Zion City, a religious utopian community in Illinois. In Chinatown, she first gave a lecture to the New York chapter of the Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association at the home of one of its members “to encourage them,” and then spoke until 11:00 PM to the general membership at the Mott Street Baohuanghui headquarters.
From New York, Tongbi traveled alone on the all-night train to Chicago, arriving at 5:00 PM and was greeted by Baohuanghui members:After seeing all the members in the Chapter office, I was taken to the home of [Chicago chapter] President Moy Dong Chew (Mei Zongzhou). I was invited to give a speech at 9 [PM] at the association office and finished my speech at 12 [midnight] and then returned to my hotel.
I planned to leave for St. Louis tonight, yet all the comrades made me stay a little longer. The members of the Chicago Ladies Branch invited me to a dinner party. In the evening, I went to their place to give a speech again.
From Chicago Tongbi again traveled by herself to St. Louis. She was met by the local Baohuanghui leaders and hosted at the home of a Pastor Gibson. She had come to see the St. Louis World’s Fair, a special occasion since this was the first time China had participated officially in a world’s fair. Tongbi visited the fair in the company of new American friends, both men and women, and Baohuanghui members from St. Louis and Los Angeles. The splendor of China’s pavilion, a miniaturized replica of an imperial palace, greatly impressed the Americans. However, it was the Chinese Village operated by a Chinese American company in the carnival portion of the fairgrounds that represented China to Tongbi and filled her with shame. When Tongbi encountered two women with bound feet swaying on the streets of the Chinese Village, she felt the women as well as China had been humiliated. She was not the only Chinese disturbed by the American fascination that these women evoked and their unseemly role as entertainers on the midway. The St. Louis Baohuanghui had already raised $400 to send the women back to San Francisco. “Yet they still covet every opportunity to get in the village. If there is nobody to stop them, they would stay and make more money.”56 “I was overwhelmed by indignation when I saw this last night and scolded them harshly [for two hours] until I left at 10 PM.” Tongbi also noted with interest the painting of Empress Dowager Cixi by American Katharine Carl, which hung prominently in the international portrait gallery.57 “She was dressed in a yellow robe, draped in a pearl cape. Her fingernails were sheathed in jade. Westerners don’t understand this or think it looks like a beast’s claws. I overheard them talking about this and said to them, look at my fingernails—our women are not like that, only she is.”58
Tongbi’s first four years in the United States were closely supervised by Yung Wing (Rong Hong) of Hartford, Connecticut. Yung had been charged by his close friend and associate Kang Youwei with arranging and monitoring his daughter’s education and housing. Yung greeted Tongbi in Hartford on October 22, , and hosted her at his home for a time.59 She would spend the better part of the next three years studying under Yung Wing and a physician, Mary Starr Tudor of South Windsor, Connecticut, and lived for most of that time with Dr. Tudor.60 During those years of tutoring in English and normal academic work, she may have had some ties with Trinity College in Hartford.61
Local Baohuanghui leaders put Tongbi’s celebrity to good use and not simply to advocate women’s rights. After her speech to the wives of powerful New York City Baohuanghui members, three wealthy merchants provided funds sufficient to inaugurate the long-awaited Zhongguo Weixin Bao (Chinese Reform News).62 The first issue appeared on March 10, , and covered a talk by Tongbi organized by the Hartford chapter in a nearby town, which drew more than three hundred people. She argued that China could only be saved by Chinese unifying behind their nation—explicitly by joining the reform association—a simple but effective idea that struck home in Chinese communities riven by feuds and mistrust.
Miss Kang spoke of the fierce competition in the world, and if we didn’t join together and form organizations, we could not save China. Quarrels are frequent among the compatriots in every city. There is truly great power in solidarity. When she spoke like this, we were very touched. We Han are grandchildren of the Yellow Emperor and must take a lesson from history that we are all kin, forget grudges and embrace righteousness. With a firm heart, do what you can for the reform endeavour …63
Hartford newspapers reported continuously on Tongbi during her lengthy stay in that city. Once, there were headlines that her life had been threatened, and that men with connections with the Qing government were on their way to assassinate her.64 She, like her father, was considered a dangerous rebel, according to the press. In reality, as noted above, political relations between the reformers—other than Kang Youwei himself—and Qing officials had quietly and dramatically changed since Liang Qitian and Xu Qin visited the United States. In her memoirs, for example, Tongbi recorded her welcome at the Chinese legation in Washington, DC, in October : “One day, [Secretary of the Chinese Legation] Chow Tszchi [Zhou Ziqi] invited us to a tea party, then took us to the White House to see President Roosevelt. The so-called “white palace” is just a white house. I also saw President Roosevelt’s wife and two daughters.”65
Tongbi became a central figure for the Baohuanghui and Kang in North America. Just how central is clear from the size and range of her correspondence during just one year of her stay in the United States, from October to October . This correspondence is part of a remarkable collection that Tongbi left behind in the home of the Starr-Tudor family of South Windsor, Connecticut, where she lived until she went to college in New York City in . The South Windsor Collection includes 220 letters (55 from Kang Youwei); 40 photographs; many miscellaneous items (receipts, Baohuanghui posters, membership rosters, printed reports from Baohuanghui headquarters, newspaper articles, published and unpublished poems and other writings); a portion of Kang Tongbi’s diary; and what is probably the earliest extant version of Kang’s self-written chronicle (nianpu).66 Kang’s letters to his daughter are notable for an intimacy lacking in his letters to other disciples, often writing to Tongbi about sensitive topics, both personal and political. Kang also displayed his emotional volatility along with an unusual ability to work with persons with equally strong and sometimes conflicting views. The correspondence features rapid exchanges between letter writers about events as they are unfolding for Kang and his political party. Tongbi received constant orders from her father and communicated with many secondary leaders traveling with Kang or hosting him in their cities. Her circle of correspondents included men and women, both Chinese and American, in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Asia.
The South Windsor Collection reveals that Kang put Tongbi in charge of managing the design, manufacturing, payment, and distribution of about 20,000 Baohuanghui badges, constantly pestering her with detailed demands and changes in orders. She also was asked to put pressure on the aged Yung Wing to undertake an English translation of Kang’s biography (Wo Zhuan), covering his life to date and his political, philosophical, religious and pedagogical views that Kang wanted the English-speaking world to read. During , when Kang traveled to about fifty American cities, Tongbi became a clearinghouse for the organization receiving frequent updates and requests from Baohuanghui leaders traveling with Kang or from cities hosting him. Tongbi was also kept informed of much larger issues dominating Baohuanghui discussion at that time, the anti-American boycott, Western Military Academy troubles, and the challenge of Sun Yatsen and his revolutionary followers. Moreover, Tongbi was privy to or intimately involved in various plots to assassinate Cixi and Sun Yatsen, as described in Chapter 4.
On September 12, , Kang Tongbi entered Hartford Public High School for less than half a year’s study, and then feeling that she needed more “personal attention than can be given in a public school,” she left for New York.67 She had made previous application to Barnard College and was admitted as a special student in spring .68
Kang Tongbi audited courses in English, French, history, and education at Barnard. According to Barnard’s dean, “she not only pursued them with success, but also gained the esteem respect of her instructors.”69 She had at least one article published in a school journal soon after her enrollment. It relived her experience of being lost with her father while riding on horseback from India to Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, in .70 In the following year, she was courteously included in the senior section of the yearbook listed as “Tung Phi Kang, Canton, China, ‘Mistress of herself, though China fall.’”71
Perhaps because she had been a fervent advocate for Chinese women’s rights, Kang Tongbi took a different stance than most of her Barnard classmates on whether American women should have the right to vote. “Many people ask my ideas on woman’s suffrage. I believe that America is ripe for it; but this will take time in my country,” she wrote in an essay in the Chicago Tribune published in .72 Tongbi’s outspoken convictions were demonstrated when “in ‒, Miss Kang was one of only 28 students out of a total registration of 498 bold enough to publicly support the radical cause of women’s suffrage by joining the Barnard College Chapter of the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York.”73
Liang Qichao was certainly Kang’s “precursor” of greatest renown. His fame came not only as Kang’s closest disciple but from the clarion call of his prolific political commentary, which appeared in reform newspapers and journals. Accordingly, “he became an inspiration and an idol—a patriotic hero, whose command of Chinese classical learning together with a remarkable sensitivity to ideas and trends in the West, gave him the appearance of an intellectual giant joining Occident and Orient, almost a universal man.”74
But Liang was also a workhorse for the Baohuanghui, eschewing the pleasures of tourism and scholarly retreat indulged in by his teacher. By the time he arrived in British Columbia on March 3, , Liang had traveled on behalf of the Baohuanghui in Japan, Hawaiʻi, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon, Australia, and the Philippine Islands. In these travels, he founded new chapters, established or bolstered newspapers and schools, founded publishing and translation businesses, raised funds and promoted Commercial Corporation shares, and built the symbolic and structural bones of the Baohuanghui. Crossing Canada, Liang went to New York, Boston, Washington—where he and his interpreter Bao Chi met with Secretary of State John M. Hay and President Theodore Roosevelt—and then toured the western and northwestern United States, ending his journey in California in October.75 Liang not only went to major cities in the United States, but made a point of reaching the Chinese population of such localities as rural Idaho.76
After nearly nine months in Canada and the United States—from early March to the end of November —Liang returned to Japan and in published his trip journal as Xin Dalu Youji (Travel Notes from the New World).77 Scholars have mined this journal in a number of book chapters and articles, so a detailed account of Liang Qichao’s sojourn in North America is redundant.78 Liang’s Baohuanghui legacy can better be judged by summarizing his contributions to the organization’s institutional structure and culture, allowing us also to observe the Baohuanghui’s worldwide development since .
The full extent of Liang Qichao’s Baohuanghui work is difficult to measure because many elements of the organizational culture cannot be traced to a single creator. However, Liang’s presence in North America in also coincided with the emergence of a distinct symbolic Baohuanghui identity that directly reflected Liang’s conceptualization of the proper goals of the organization and, by extension, the Chinese nation. Compared to Kang, whose concerns were of a more universal nature, Liang probed deeply into how groups, and especially political associations, were essential to cultivating citizenship and a sense of common nationality.
Before his North American trip—but after months in Australia and the U.S. territory of Hawaiʻi—Liang began to write a series entitled Xinmin Shuo (The New Citizen) for his Yokohama newspaper, Xinmin Congbao (Sein Min Choong Bou). According to historian Peter Zarrow, Liang called for the Chinese people “to become more active, assertive, and responsible citizens, capable of contributing to a strong nation.” The New Citizen “advocated a strong nationalist consciousness and the ideal of devotion to group.”79
Both Kang and Liang saw groups as the building blocks of ever-larger and more powerful aggregations of people. However, whereas Kang sought a one-world Datong as his ultimate goal, the more practical Liang “turned to the ‘nation’ as the sole hope for China’s survival, survival in a world of endless, brutal struggle.”80 The key to building a nation was “renewing the people” (xinmin). Adopting this Confucian term for Liang’s “new citizen,” writes Zarrow, “was no coincidence.”81 Liang was referring to the traditional practice of self-cultivation and prefaced The New Citizen by extending the concept of renewal from the individual to the nation: “If we are to make a country stable, prosperous and glorious, then we must understand the Way of renewing the people.”82
In “Self-Government” (“Zizhi”), Liang contrasted Chinese who had accepted despotic rule for thousands of years with the Anglo-Saxons who “possess the greatest capacity for self-government of any race in the world,” thus making Britain globally dominant economically and militarily.83 “Look at how fewer than ten thousand British people live in India today, while they have tamed 200 million Indians to be as obedient as a flock of sheep.” Liang argued that this national power stemmed from self-disciplined, orderly individuals able to formulate and obey both rules governing themselves and laws governing their schools, communities, provinces, and nation. From such self-governance, Liang claimed, “a country of complete and perfect liberty, equality, independence and autonomy [will] be created,” and perhaps more crucially, with the strength to resist foreign intervention. Chinese citizens needed to look to themselves and take responsibility for their nation, rather than vainly hope for “wise rulers and ministers” to emerge and guide China. Liang condemned this attitude as creating the “most corrupt government and the weakest people” in Asia.84
Since its initiation in , the Baohuanghui network in North America had grown impressively, with Liang Qichao himself overseeing the founding of about twenty new chapters during his trip, many of them in small towns in the Pacific Northwest as well as in the major cities of Montreal and Toronto. He reported in his journal that there were eighty-six chapters in the Americas and Hawaiʻi, but party historian Wu Xianzi, whose statistics might be more accurate, added the chapters formed during Liang’s visit and came up with a grand total of 103 chapters in eleven divisions in .85 These chapters were in addition to those in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia, Southeast Asia, and South Africa.
Only four years after the Baohuanghui was founded, it was well on its way to the approximately two hundred chapters in cited by Wu in his party history.86 Because many chapter locations are known only by their Chinese names, it is difficult to link them to accepted geographical names. Thus, “Mapping the Baohuanghui” in Appendix 2 is undoubtedly incomplete.87 However, by , North America still predominated, with 160 chapters: Canada, 55 chapters; United States (including Hawaiʻi), 93 chapters; and Mexico, 12 chapters.88
TABLE 1 Division Headquarters No. of chapters 1 Canada Vancouver 12 2 California San Francisco 6 3 Northwest U.S. Portland 26 4 Eastern U.S. New York City 6 5 Central U.S. Chicago 13 6 Southern U.S. New Orleans 4 7 Montana Helena 12 8 Mexico Torreón 9 9 Central America Panama City, Panama 4 10 South America Lima, Peru 3 11 Hawaiʻi Honolulu 8By , some of the chapters Liang visited already boasted their own association halls (many more opened by the time of Kang’s arrival in ) to accommodate meetings, lectures, newspaper offices, schools, and Western Military Academy classrooms. These halls had one or more rooms or the entire building. In most cases, the chapter headquarters were located in buildings owned or leased by wealthy merchant members. Liang wrote a pair of scrolls for the new Los Angeles chapter and asked that the Baohuanghui charter be framed and hung.89 He also asked the Los Angeles leaders to make copies of their new charter to send to the Fresno chapter and also to “keep in constant communication with other cities, especially those nearby—Fresno, Sacramento and Hanford—so you can encourage them” (implying their backwardness). San Francisco, Liang observed, “has made headlong progress,” and described the public election of chapter officers and a state-wide president (zongli), since San Francisco was headquarters for Baohuanghui’s California division.
The scope of the Baohuanghui and its associated newspapers, schools, businesses, and political activities is apparent from Liang’s description of the letters he wrote before leaving San Francisco on his return to Japan. He informed his Los Angeles comrades: “I have also written a farewell letter, a public letter regarding the newly formed Commercial Corporation (Shangwu Gongsi), a public letter regarding the Guangdong Public School (Guangdong Gongxue), and a public letter refuting the exclusion regulations.” All were delivered to the San Francisco newspaper office, Wenxing Bao (Mon Hing Bo, The Chinese World), to be printed and mailed to members.90
In spite of Liang’s apparent success at expanding the Baohuanghui network, he was deeply discouraged by his fundraising results and poured out his frustration to Kang in a long letter from San Francisco on November 18, .91 He bemoaned that the combined efforts of Xu Qin for six months and himself for nearly a year yielded less than 10,000 Chinese yuan, bringing little gain if transportation costs were deducted for Xu, himself, and his interpreter Bao Chi (Pow Chee). The American chapters had raised three times that amount, 30,000 Chinese yuan, including 10,000 yuan by New York City members alone, but Liang complained that their remittances to Hong Kong were only a small part of this. For instance, New York had sent Hong Kong only HK$2,000, in addition to giving Xu Qin about 1,000 (currency unclear) for the Guangdong Public School. Liang said when he was in New York City, “they treated me with public funds most of the time [rather than with individual contributions by the leaders]. Their generosity results from using other people’s money.” He calculated that New York still had US$1,000 in its coffers, and “I cannot force them to remit it.” The same was true of other chapters Liang visited, but he found San Francisco the most recalcitrant. “I spent more than two months in this city arguing about using public funds to solve real problems. My failure truly hurts me.” He admitted that San Francisco could not remit all their public funds, but “they have their own thoughts and do not follow our instructions.” They also “looked down upon our members in Hong Kong” and were reluctant to send the expected remittance. In addition, Liang found, that “if a chapter does not set up an association office, it will soon disband; if it has a clubhouse, its public funds are often used up.” Fundraising was made all the more difficult because Kang used the remitted funds to support secret activities, such as assassination plans, which could not be divulged to members (see Chapter 4). “One has to ask to what extent our efforts contribute to the actual situation in China and benefit the social reformers in our local chapters in America.” Liang wanted the public funds to be used for education, which members could easily support. He had more success selling Commercial Corporation shares, perhaps because members saw them as good investments.
The network’s heart was the Baohuanghui’s official headquarters, which, at various times, was in Macau, Yokohama, or Hong Kong. In actual practice, however, ultimate responsibility lay with Kang, who kept on the move and lacked full trust in his subordinates. The first headquarters was probably shared between Yokohama, where Vice President Liang and the newspaper Qingyi Bao were located, and Macau, with its pioneer Baohuanghui newspaper, Zhixin Bao. But Macau became too dangerous after the failed Qinwang uprising, and Zhixin Bao was closed under Qing government pressure in early . Hong Kong took over as financial and business headquarters, and although it never had the political power of Macau, a large portion of member dues was sent back to support it and Kang’s activities. After the Huayi Bank (Wah Yick) was set up in New York in , it began to share fiscal responsibility with Hong Kong for dispersing funds to various Baohuanghui projects. The United States became the unofficial “offshore” headquarters of the Baohuanghui by the time Kang Youwei arrived there in February and was more central to the organization than the official headquarters in Hong Kong and Macau.
Many working-class Chinese men and women in the communities where Baohuanghui chapters were established gave of their hard-earned money to support the Baohuanghui. But Kang and his deputies who visited Canadian, American, and Mexican Chinatowns were an impressive sight. They were well-educated, well-dressed articulate men, and a few women, who were passionate about their cause. They promised not only to restore the emperor but to reform China through the creation of a modern, Western-style constitutional monarchy. These overseas Chinese had memories of their villages and their families who remained and surely hoped for an improvement in China’s place in the world. They were not likely to achieve the reformers’ sophistication and aspirations, but the presence of such distinguished visitors from the homeland who not only sought China’s modernization but eventually took up the cause of opposing anti-Chinese racism in North America was well received. There would have been no little pride among the men who donned sharp-looking military uniforms and hope for women who listened to speeches about gender equality. But the average person could not have missed, and may have basked in the reflected glory of the apparent wealth of Kang and the others as they lodged in expensive hotels, were entertained with sumptuous banquets given by Chinatown elites, met local dignitaries, and moved about in modes of transportation unaffordable for humble Baohuanghui supporters. When the leaders of the Baohuanghui and its successor organizations failed to achieve meaningful change in the lives of ordinary Chinese, it would have been an easy transition from financially supporting Kang’s reformers to donating to Sun’s revolutionists.
The qualities Liang sought to cultivate in Baohuanghui followers to make them into “new citizens” are open to speculation. One clue comes from the descriptions of the symbolism of the Baohuanghui flag, which appeared first during Liang’s visit in and may have been inspired or even designed by him. The flag was unfurled at parades greeting Liang and in association meeting halls he visited. In the years following Liang’s visit, it was carried aloft by marching formations of Western Military Academy cadets, who were part of the Baohuanghui network of paramilitary schools for young Chinese men.
Evoking the American stars and stripes, the Baohuanghui flag was simpler. The earliest versions have a white background and three red stars (the center star sometimes elevated or larger than the other two) between two red stripes. By , the flag sometimes was portrayed in red, white, and blue, with three white stars on blue bordered by two red stripes against a white background. It appears from extant artifacts that each chapter produced its own flags and organizational materials, following a basic design. Kang said later that the flag resembled the tricolore flag of the French Revolution, and the meanings of its stars and stripes as ascribed by Liang do echo the French concepts of liberté, égalité, fraternité.92 As best as can be determined from American newspaper coverage and the ideas behind the flag—lacking description in Baohuanghui primary sources—the stars and stripes symbolized the following ideas, as explicated in writings by Liang Qichao:93
THREE STARS:
TWO STRIPES:
Often crossed with the Qing dragon flag, the Baohuanghui flag appeared on Baohuanghui letterhead, menus for Baohuanghui banquets, chapter posters, Baohuanghui newspaper banners, membership badges, stock certificates, and the parapet of at least one Baohuanghui building in Victoria. Symbolic and material manifestations of group identity evolved over time, spurred by the visits to North America of Liang Qichao in and Kang Youwei in . In the Baohuanghui charter, Kang promoted identification with the organization through correspondence and exchange of photographs among chapters, because “foreign people mock us as a heap of loose sand.”96 By , a favored medium of exchange among chapters was the group photo montage or poster, picturing chapter officers and active members, along with Kang, Liang and the Guangxu Emperor. Chapter offices displayed these photo montages on their office walls in a display of solidarity and brotherhood.97 Because they are striking and produced with care, several of these posters have been preserved and show the diverse membership of the chapters. For example, Marysville, California, included a woman and baby among its members; Western dress and absence of queues predominate among members of the Rossland, British Columbia, chapter, whereas most members wear Chinese dress and queues in Butte, Montana.98
Historian Theresa Man Lee has observed that “Liang [Qichao], and more generally late-Qing reformers, identified the transformation of subjects into citizens as the most daunting task in modernizing the imperial state.”99 This is clear from Liang’s New Citizen series, which emphasized the deliberate efforts required of individual citizens in each stage of the state-making process. And, Lee astutely notes that this concern with creating citizens and effective political institutions was not shared with Sun Yatsen and the revolutionaries. This was “puzzling precisely because the revolutionaries advocated outright republicanism as opposed to constitutional monarchy,” and “a republic would most certainly require citizens rather than subjects.” Instead of the elaborate organizational strategies of Kang and Liang to develop a politically conscious citizenry, revolutionaries focused on inspiring “national pride … first and foremost defined by anti-Manchuism.” This lack of concern with institution-building may be one reason for the rapid disintegration of the Republic’s political integrity after its founding in .
Liang’s theories of developing the qualities of “new citizens” are apparent in the charter he wrote for the Los Angeles chapter near the end of his visit to the United States in .100 First, he succinctly described Baohuanghui goals:This association aims to save China. The efforts of each of the four hundred million Chinese people must be combined in order to carry out the emperor’s reforms.
The purpose of this association is to establish a constitutional government. After the constitutional government is established, we will form a large political party that will always exert itself in the affairs of the nation.
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These goals make clear that Liang saw the Baohuanghui as the vanguard of a Chinese political party that would participate in a future constitutional government and, until that time, be the vehicle for fighting to restore Guangxu’s reform program. A constitutional system was the ultimate aim rather than protecting the emperor.
In the charter, Liang mandates four activities:
The concrete goals and activities Liang outlined in his charter for Los Angeles did not appear in the articles of incorporation, which emphasized instructing the Chinese in California in the ways of “modern progress” so that they could help the emperor and Chinese in China make similar advances. However, Liang also believed that an important Baohuanghui function was to teach members civic values and behavior useful to China’s modernization. In the journal of his American travels, Liang wrote that the bylaws of the Chinese associations in San Francisco “generally follow those of Western societies, which are civilized and comprehensive, but when I look at how their members actually behave, not one fails to violate their bylaws.”103 On the other hand, Liang was mightily impressed after observing the competitive election of Baohuanghui leaders in Canada, complete with vigorous campaigning, and described it as an historic event in the formation of Chinese political parties. Both observations might have led Liang to take great pains in composing the Los Angeles charter. He explained in an accompanying letter to that city’s leaders:… unite for educational purposes and in a more united way to advance the interests of the Chinese residents of California in order to be better enabled to more efficiently advance the interests of the Chinese morally and mentally and instruct them along the lines of modern progress, and to place them in a position to assist their countrymen in China to participate in the benefits of enlightenment and learning, and to assist the Emperor and his subjects in such advancement, and to own, buy, sell and mortgage property only sufficient to carry on the work above set out.102
Probably I put in too many details in the section on meeting procedures. This is because Chinese people never had any rules for holding a meeting, and therefore a meeting often ends up with no decision or resolutions. This charter takes the meeting rules of Western meetings of all kinds as a model, and we Chinese should learn from them.104
The Los Angeles charter specified weekly membership meetings on Sunday evenings, and if there was no official business to discuss, “lectures will be given.” Liang listed twelve regulations governing meetings, which were to be run by a chairman, sergeant at arms to deal with members speaking out of turn or other disruptions, and a record keeper. One issue at a time was to be discussed, with members required to stand when speaking, and if two persons spoke at the same time, the sergeant at arms could stop both from speaking. When consensus on an issue could not be reached, a vote was taken, with approval by a simple majority. Liang even described how to vote by raising one’s hand to signify approval. Wearing a hat and smoking were prohibited.
Membership was “open to any patriotic Chinese … regardless of their surname, native place, or religion,” and each member was obligated to pay dues (one U.S. silver dollar with “additional donations accepted”). “Foreigners” could also become Baohuanghui members if recommended by two members and approved by the chapter president and vice president.105 It is notable that Liang asked the Los Angeles leaders to prepare a list of chapter members and the amount of their donations for publication in the Baohuanghui’s San Francisco newspaper, Wenxing Bao. It became common practice for such lists to be published periodically in Baohuanghui newspapers, giving chapters and individual members public acknowledgment of their donations as well as spurring competitive giving, a tactic Liang himself had described when he was contemplating organizing Yokohama reformers in early .106 The charter specifies that funds in the chapter’s treasury were to “be treated like national bonds” that would be repaid with a share of the profits “in the future when the reforms succeed.” To forestall too much independent action, the chapter was “under the direction of the general association,” in other words, Kang Youwei.
Among the twelve categories of officers described in the Los Angeles charter were two that consciously projected the organization into the greater community: an English-language clerk to translate documents “that concern relations with Americans” and orators “to make speeches to the public to advocate the principles of the association.” Liang also wrote a variety of cross-checking duties into the positions dealing with money, with an auditor to oversee the accountant, two treasurers responsible for common funds and local office funds, and monthly posting of the financial statement at the chapter office.
After Liang Qichao’s visit, Kang Youwei developed a standard Baohuanghui membership badge. He saw membership badges (huipai) as an important public display of Baohuanghui identity, proof of membership, and a source of funds. Badges were discussed numerous times in Kang’s and others’ correspondence, and regulations regarding their design and cost were detailed in the charter (see Chapter 7). One justification for requiring badges was the assertion that persons pretending to be Baohuanghui members had illicitly enjoyed the hospitality of the association when visiting other chapters. Henceforth, Baohuanghui members were required to wear their badges at association functions, both at home and when traveling, “to show they are comrades.”107
Surviving examples of Baohuanghui badges show a variety of metals and designs, in part because there was no centralized production of the badges until Kang became directly involved in late .108 One example has a round shape with a pointed scalloped bottom and a scalloped crest with a loop suspension ring to which a ribbon and pin could be attached. Guangxu’s image is inside a beaded oval frame in the center of the badge. Above the oval frame are two crossed flags: on the left, the three-star, three-stripe Baohuanghui flag, and on the right, the dragon flag of China. This is counter to the description in Section 10 of the Baohuanghui constitution. It stipulated the Qing flag on the left and the Baohuanghui flag on the right. Another example has the initials C.E.R.A. (Chinese Empire Reform Association) vertically on the left rim of the badge. To the right, in Chinese characters, is the inscription Baohuanghui Tongzhi (Baohuanghui comrade). Guangxu’s portrait is in between the inscriptions. The reverse of the badge is plain and the outlines of the stamped images of the flags and Guangxu can be seen. The color is white or nickel; composition unknown.109
A bronze-colored version found in a time capsule at the Victoria Baohuanghui headquarters has the identical design with a horizontal top bar made of the same copper-nickel alloy attached to the loop ring. The top bar is framed with a beaded line and has room for an inscription. No inscription is shown; perhaps the member’s name, rank, or the chapter’s city or town was meant to be engraved there. The constitution stipulated special staff badges (zhilipai), probably with appropriate rank inscription on a top bar. A June letter also mentions special badges for Baohuanghui officers.110 Whether they were produced or not is not clear but the one found in Victoria may be of this category.
Archaeologists found a Baohuanghui badge in Butte’s Chinatown in . The partially corroded badge was one of some 60,000 artifacts recovered during the excavations. The badge’s design is the same as those discussed above (round shape, scalloped bottom, scalloped crest) and presumably is made of copper-nickel alloy.111
Prior to Kang’s return to North America in , a number of gold-plated and silver medals for special Baohuanghui members had been made in London. These medals (baoxing) were probably the same ones described in the contemporary press.112 One was fabricated as an eight-pointed star with a medallion of the Guangxu Emperor on one side and crossed flags on the reverse (the Qing dragon flag and the Baohuanghui flag). The inscription, in Chinese, said that it had been presented in the Guangxu Emperor’s thirtieth year () by Kang Youwei and also included the characters for Baohuanghui beneath the flags. The medal was said to be made of “solid silver” and one of only twelve given to Americans. It was presented to Reverend Frederick Poole of Philadelphia, an ardent American supporter of the Baohuanghui. Kang supposedly made a formal presentation of the award when he was in Philadelphia in June , but Poole only received the actual medal on July 12. A similar silver medal, “in the shape of a star,” was presented to the captain of the Chinese militia company in Butte, Montana, on September 29. “One side,” it was reported, “bears a raised picture of the young emperor of China and the flag of the reform association, which is similar to the American flag.”113
The London badges include Guangxu’s image beneath crossed Qing and Baohuanghui flags set off with sun rays on the obverse. The reverse has the characters “Baohuanghui tongzhi.” They were made of “yellow copper.” The badges made in the United States eliminated the rays, had the “Baohuanghui tongzhi” inscription in smaller characters on the obverse (the reverse was left blank), and were to be made of “white copper.”114
A gold medal of unique design was presented to Western Military Academy chief instructor Homer Lea at a banquet on January 2, , celebrating the opening of the Los Angeles Baohuanghui office.115 Signaling Lea’s continued rise within the Baohuanghui, the medal has the Chinese characters for loyalty and honesty (zhong and cheng) in the center of a round beaded frame with “Los Angeles chapter” in Chinese across the top. The two central characters are encircled by two other inscriptions in Chinese that read: “Respectfully presented by Baohuanghui members” (Baohuanghui tongren jingzeng) “to Comrade General Lea” (Li Jiangjun tongzhi huicun).116 The outer edges are embellished with intricate ornamental curls and twists. The medal is suspended by sewn-together red, white, and blue ribbons which themselves hang from an ornate gold upper portion containing the initials C.E.R.A. This medal was listed in an accounting of badge sales and distribution by Li Zesheng of New York as a “gold badge with carved letters.”117
Membership badges were a constant concern in Kang’s letters to daughter Tongbi, beginning sometime before December .118 It was time to manufacture quantities of badges for the general membership in a cost-effective manner with less attention to fine materials and fancy design. As with most Baohuanghui matters, even the badges were controversial. Kang told Tongbi to obtain quotes from both England and the United States to manufacture 10,000 badges with “either one or two flags above the Emperor and the five characters for ‘Baohuanghui Comrade’.” Kang suggested that the text size be reduced by half, allowing both Chinese and English to be used. To save money and for the sake of egalitarianism, he wanted these badges made of copper and tin “so that everyone will be the same.”119 But after new badges were produced with the modified design, Tang Mingsan of the New York City Baohuanghui said of them: “People here think they do not look good and say that they are hard to sell.” However, the limited-edition gold and silver badges were meant for special recipients, not for the general membership. Kang had a few in hand when he arrived in Los Angeles and gave the special gold badge to Homer Lea and silver ones to his drill masters.120
In late , Kang, while still in British Columbia, wanted Tongbi in Connecticut to oversee the production of the general membership badges. He told her that Tang Mingsan did not know English, and “he could be cheated by others.” So he directed Tongbi to obtain a cost estimate for the production of 10,000 badges and to purchase the copper and tin needed to produce the medals. Everything about the badges was to be kept secret.121 In a second letter, Kang said the badges should cost fifty cents or less to produce and would be sold for one dollar (about US$35 in prices), thus the production of 20,000 badges would raise at least $10,000 for the association. Kang was very detail-oriented in this matter. To avoid the heavy expense of customs duties, Tongbi was told to have them fabricated in the United States. He specified the use of a copper-nickel alloy rather than brass. The design was to be modified “without rays or make the rays smaller or just use the two flags,” and Baohuanghui tongzhi was to be put on the front of the badge next to the emperor’s portrait and at half the size as on the gold and silver medals. He told Tongbi that an order of several thousand would suffice at first. “Do it quickly,” he ordered her, “[and] I will distribute badges in every town I go to.”122 Tongbi replied by telegram to her father’s directives in his first and second December letters. The telegrams are not extant but it is clear from Kang’s replies what issues confronted her. She asked Kang to send one of the London-made silver medals as a model. He replied that he would send several and that the new copper medals were to be made smaller―“even half the size”―to lower costs. On a practical note, Kang said he had asked Ye En in Vancouver to arrange “from several hundred to a thousand dollars to wire to you to make the medals.”123
Kang questioned Tongbi about the badge order status during the ensuing months and told her to send 2,000 to Vancouver. In January, just before he reached Portland, Oregon, and having not received any badges, he asked Tongbi to instead “send a few hundred” to him in that city.124 He had not received the badges because they had yet to be produced, but a prototype was available. Tongbi sent him a sample in February, and he replied that “our comrades” were not happy with it. Contrary to Kang’s intent that the emperor’s image represent “an iconography of vigorous imperial leadership,” members told him that the portrait “does not look illustrious and also appears quite sad.”125 Yet, the unidentified comrades also did not want to spend a thousand dollars to change the die. A second message complained again about the emperor’s sad and impotent visage, adding that the painted color “looks pale and dull.” Although Kang knew it would cost more, now he asked if the flags also could be done in color. “It would be more beautiful,” he declared.126 Part of Tongbi’s problem was finding a better portrait of Guangxu and, in the end, the “sad” version was used.127 Kang soon announced that “we will use the antiqued bronze color for our badges” because they would look similar to those produced in London, “thus mitigating some people’s hostility.”128 Facing a shortage of funds available from Hong Kong, Kang sought to lower the cost, telling Tongbi the manufacturer “could use less white copper” (a copper-nickel alloy).
In the meantime, the medals made in London were causing problems. Li Fuji in Victoria wrote to Kang Tongbi in late March saying that the Baohuanghui would have to pay duty of thirty cents per medal, thus adding to the overall cost. Moreover, it was discovered that they were not solid gold or silver but only gold or silver plated. The customs manifest declared them as solid gold and silver, thus the high duty cost. A batch of one hundred medals had been sent from London (presumably to New York), and then shipped onward to Canada (presumably Victoria) at a cost of $29 duty. This must have been the batch Li Fuji complained about. Luo Chang had mailed a package from London in November to Tang Mingsan at the Chinese Reform News Publishing Company office in New York City. When this second batch “of several hundred” medals was held up over the duty issue, Kang feared that they might have been confiscated by U.S. customs officials and told Tongbi in April to not pick them up. Instead she was told to telegraph Luo Chang to send one or two gold medals to Kang and mail the rest to Hong Kong after they had been retrieved from New York.129
In January or February, Luo wrote to the Returned Letter Office in London asking what had happened to his package and was informed on March 16 that it remained unclaimed at the American Express Office in New York City awaiting payment of duty and warehousing charges. A month later, two more letters were written concerning the London-made badges. On April 13, Tang Mingsan in New York wrote to Luo Chang saying he had not picked up the badges because Luo had not sent an invoice for them. Now the “Buddha” (Kang Youwei) wanted the badges, and Tang asked Luo to go to the manufacturer’s shop and obtain an invoice indicating “exactly what the gold badges are made of, so that the duty amount will be properly decided.” Coincidently, the next day Luo wrote again to the British post office in London, asking them to have the package of badges returned. On May 2, however, Tang Mingsan sent a messenger to the American Express office to pay the duty. Luo was informed a month later by the British post office that the duty had been paid and the badges had been retrieved by Tang.130
Surviving receipts, invoices and correspondence show how many badges were made, how much they cost, and who the supplier was. Kang Tongbi gave the job to the Ernst Schall Company, “Jewelers, Silversmiths and Diamond Merchants” and purveyors of “Fine Watches, Bric-a-Brac and Optical Goods” located at 941 Main Street in Hartford.131 Schall’s was once described as “one of the most enterprising and attractive of the many fine businesses of Hartford” and “one of the oldest businesses in the city,” having been founded in the early s.132 By all descriptions, the Schall Company was a jewelry business and offered to design “presentation jewels, badges, emblems [and] class pins.” But evidently the company did not perform foundry work, such as required by the Baohuanghui badges.133 The Schall Company records apparently no longer exist and it may not be possible to determine who actually manufactured the Baohuanghui badges or even if they were made in Hartford. A hint of a possible manufacturer appears in a brief postcard message from Yung Wing to Kang Tongbi on May 1, : “… please send back the proposal for manufacturing the gold and copper badges by ‘Bolie’ so we have the document on file.”134 At the time, the city had numerous companies performing die making and metal casting. The only foundry seen in the Hartford business directory whose name comes close to “Bolie” (伯烈 or Ba-liht in Cantonese) is J. Blake and Son, brass founders and copper smiths.135
One of Kang Tongbi’s interlocutors in the badge business was James R. Stevens, a clerk and later business associate at Schall Company. His business card was found among Kang Tongbi’s personal papers. A letter written to her by Yung Wing in February said he had heard from an individual in New York City whom he did not identify, “through Mr. Stevens,” that the badges could not be manufactured for less than nineteen cents apiece for an order of 6,000. Yung assured Tongbi of the following delivery schedule, pending her approval of the first medal: “2,000 on the 22nd of February; 2,000 on the 28th of Feby; & the final 2,000 of 6th March.”136 In fact, it was later revealed in correspondence, that it was Yung who had made the first inquiry with Schall concerning the badges.137 But who Yung’s proposed provider was is not known, only that James Stevens needed Tongbi’s “assent to this arrangement.” It also was around this time that Kang Tongbi gave a lavish lunar New Year banquet at the King Far Low restaurant for twenty of her friends, including her teachers—Yung Wing and two unidentified Hartford physicians—“and a number of ladies from this city.”138
A series of invoices and receipts issued by the Schall Company tell the rest of the story. Kang Tongbi made an initial payment to Schall on March 4, , of $380 and received an invoice acknowledging this amount and that 2,000 badges were “Awaiting your instructions to ship.”139 On April 17, Schall issued an invoice to Tongbi for 3,000 badges that had been “recolored in copper color.” The cost was $90.140 Tongbi, being a modern woman in America, used the to call in her next order to Schall. Company president Ernst Schall himself wrote to Tongbi, acknowledging her “valued order for more medals made of bronze” and saying that he had hurried to place the order so that it would be ready by May 1. And, he had done this quickly despite having had to change the die. What change was made was not stated. He also noted that had she originally ordered 4,000 badges, he could have reduced the cost to eighteen cents per badge. Always a gentleman in his correspondence, Schall said “At any rate I placed the order & thank you in advance & for the past for your Extreme Kindness.”141 Despite the statement that he “could have” reduced the cost to eighteen cents per badge, he actually did reduce it to that price in a subsequent invoice.142 On April 22, Schall wrote to Tongbi reporting that he had sent 500 medals that day to the Chinese Reform News Publishing Company in New York and that she could expect 2,000 more on May 1 and an additional 2,000 on May 8.143 On April 28, Schall wrote again to Tongbi about the order of 4,000 additional medals, the ones due on May 1 and 8. He asked if she would like to inspect them before he boxed them for shipping. And, would she be so kind as to pay him the $90 for the bronze plating of 3,000 medals. “This amount I had to pay cash and it is of no profit to me,” the German-born Schall gently complained in his less than perfect English, and “all of orders of this kind I had to agree to pay on delivery of the medals.”144
With some badges now in hand, Kang directed they be distributed to Baohuanghui chapters in St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, DC, in advance of his visits so members would be wearing them when he arrived. “Only in this way,” wrote Kang, “can we distribute the badges fast and get our investment (money) back.”145 Kang insisted on prior distribution because he had already found that the “Members of Baohuanghui in the cities I have been wouldn’t buy the badges, thus making it difficult to collect money. For example, no one in Victoria would buy the badge.”146 He asked Tongbi to send 1,000 badges to him in Los Angeles so he could forward them to Fresno and other cities in California. The new badges were successful; Zhou Guoxian wrote from Los Angeles to Kang Tongbi on April 19 saying: “The medals are alright and agreeable to our Reform Association” and that he had wired $400 to her.147 Success was indeed achieved because, in early May, Kang wrote to Tongbi that “Now various chapters are all asking for badges, and I don’t have enough to answer their needs.” He had 2,000 badges that he had been distributing and Tang Mingsan in New York City had “only several hundred.” So, Kang asked Tongbi to order 10,000 more badges.148 A partial record made by Li Zesheng in New York City shows that 3,363 badges were mailed to individuals and chapters in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, Norfolk (Virginia), New London (Connecticut), Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Central America, but only 153—those sent to individuals—had been purchased.149
By the time Kang reached Kansas City in May , he asked that additional badges be sent to Chicago, to which he had earlier mailed five hundred.150 Altogether, 1,000 or 1,200 badges were sent to Chicago, 200 to Baltimore, and 2,100 to New York City, but 220 were missing upon receipt. Still there was dissatisfaction. As Tang Mingsan reported in mid-May:Many people here dislike the style of the badges, because they are not resplendent. They are difficult to sell. We are sending out enthusiastic people and will publish notices to try our best to sell them. Chinese people here have too much freedom, so they open their mouths and complain.151
Tang Mingsan also was unhappy about having to be the distribution point for the United States and had been criticized by Kang for failing to get badges in time to Washington and Pittsburgh. So Tang asked Tongbi to mail the badges directly to the local chapters. Around this time, Tongbi evidently was dissatisfied with the quality of the Hartford-produced badges, and Tang suggested that “more elegant” ones could be made at less cost in New York.152
Despite the dissatisfaction, an order for 10,000 more badges was placed with Ernst Schall a few days before May 15. Schall wrote politely to Tongbi that he appreciated the “extreme kindness in giving me preference in making 10,000 medals.” He assured he would do his best in regard to “workmanship & quality.” He explained again that the more ordered the cheaper the per-badge cost would be and that an order of 20,000 could have been had for fifteen cents each, what he had been led to expect when the subject of the badges originally was discussed with Yung Wing. “Small lots cost more,” and he asked her to come to his shop the next day so he could explain more clearly that with the smaller-size orders he had “to pay spot cash & can not wait for payment.” Schall preferred a face-to-face meeting rather than a conversation or an exchange of letters. He explained, though, that he no longer would pay for the badges in advance of receiving her checks. “A contract for 20,000 at 15 Cts must be made in writing,” he told Tongbi, and “must be paid on delivery” from the manufacturer to him. He reiterated that he could charge fifteen cents per badge “providing [the] quantity is furnished for cash on delivery.”153
Invoices from Schall confirm that Kang Tongbi made the required payments but it seems not in advance of Schall’s receiving the badges from the foundry. Two payments totaling $900 were made on June 17 and July 19 but Tongbi remained in arrears for $600 for her orders for a total of 10,000 badges on June 9 and 14 and July 17. And, badges were not the only business she did with Schall; an invoice in early July billed her for a $30 coral necklace and $2.50 to repair a crescent broach. Two months later, Tongbi evidently lost a gold locket and chain “of Chinese workmanship” either at the Hartford railroad station or at Brown Thomson, a Hartford department store. It was valuable enough that Yung Wing placed a classified advertisement in the Hartford Courant offering “a suitable reward.”154
But Tongbi was still learning about American-style business deals. On August 11, Schall wrote to her saying he had shipped more medals to “foreign ports” (evidently Mexico) and asked where and to whom to ship another 4,000 badges he had in stock. “I also wish that you will kindly send checks for this balance order $600,” wrote Schall. He explained that he “had to scratch around & pay for them 3 weeks ago” and that “I need the funds now to pay off taxes and other bills, to pay for the medals when they where [sic] delivered & now I had to pay spot cash & I had to borrow money to do that.” At the end of his missive, he insisted, “I must have the money now …”155 Facing her own financial shortfall, Tongbi paid $140 on August 18, with a balance of $460 still due. As of September 13, when Schall sent a second bill, this amount was still in arrears. He added a note at the bottom of the second invoice, saying “This account must now be settled without delay. I filled the contract according to your order at a low figure & I must have the $460 & I give you this notice to attend to it at once.”156 After five more days, Schall stepped up his demand for payment saying if she did not pay for the 4,000 badges, he would be forced to withdraw the money Tongbi owed from her checking account. It seemed, said Schall, that Tongbi was withholding payment because of the lost or delayed shipment of 1,000 badges sent to Mexico; “this cannot do any longer. The medals you ordered must now be paid for.” This is the last extant piece of correspondence between Ernst Schall and Kang Tongbi but surely was not the end of their dispute as he threatened to “draw on your Bank for the Bill that we sent you” if she did not pay by return mail.157 However, her father apparently came to Tongbi’s rescue a month later, sending $250 to her from Portland and $200 from New York, and informed her that “the funds for the badges are settled.”158
By this time, though, Kang’s travels in the United States were nearly ended and it remains uncertain how his scheme of having the badges sold in advance of his arrival in each locale worked out and what the cost was for each badge. It is obvious that the sale of badges was both an important source of income as well as a heavy drain on expenses.
Even before their exile, Kang and Liang were pioneers in publishing newspapers for political purposes. Their first effort was in Beijing in with a daily newssheet for government officials at a time when Kang said that “no one in the capital dared to establish a newspaper to broaden our general understanding of world affairs.”159 Once abroad they found greater freedom to publish and with an expanded readership, focused on education of the general populace (kai minzhi) rather than influencing elite opinion. Altogether, about forty newspapers were published in North America, Asia, and Australia.
Wenxing Bao (Mon Hing Bo or The Chinese World) in San Francisco was established in and by had become a daily.160 It was the only Baohuanghui newspaper in the United States in , although by December of that year a printing press had been ordered from China and an editor from Liang Qichao’s Datong School in Yokohama had arrived in New York City in anticipation of the publication of an East Coast newspaper, Zhongguo Weixin Bao. The New York paper published its first issue in March , at five cents a copy, with an illustrated story about Christopher Columbus on its cover and an article reporting Kang Tongbi’s speech in Hartford.161
A substantial Baohuanghui newspaper network existed in , including Xin Zhongguo Bao (Sun Chung Kwok Bo, New China News) (Honolulu); Donghua Xin Bao (Sydney); Bincheng Xin Bao (Penang); Tiannan Xin Bao (Singapore); Xinmin Congbao (Yokohama); Yadong Bao (Kōbe); and Yiyou Xin Bao (Manila).162 The Tung Wah News (Donghua Xin Bao), which had been launched in Sydney in by reformers, became the official Baohuanghui organ in Australia under the editorship of Tang Caizhi and was renamed Tung Wah Times (Donghua Bao) in . This Australian newspaper was published until and included not only news of Baohuanghui chapters in Australia but from around the world and is the only association organ for which there still exists a complete run.163 Wenxing Bao, like Baohuanghui newspapers in other cities, was the American nerve center for Baohuanghui communications, producing a daily newspaper disseminating the reform message to a wide readership of Chinese in the United States and linking distant chapters with each other and with the central party leaders through the distribution of important documents, such as those written by Liang Qichao. More than any other Baohuanghui leader, Liang—China’s most-read journalist and founder of several newspapers—was responsible for quality control and innovation for the Baohuanghui press network. The newspapers, if not having the highest circulation in the cities of their publication, were avidly read by the community elite, posted on Chinatown bulletin boards, and, in the case of newspapers published in Asia, sent into China. Liang’s cascade of intellectual and political epiphanies were quickly dispatched to his eager readers as lucid commentaries (shelun) that were generally first published in his Yokohama newspapers, Qingyi Bao and Xinmin Congbao, then reprinted worldwide by other Baohuanghui newspapers. Editors of these newspapers were selected by Kang or Liang and personally monitored by central association leaders close to Kang, such as Xu Qin.
Shortly after they were established, the newspapers became a vehicle for mobilizing political action. In the beginning, the newspapers publicized the Baohuanghui circular telegrams in and in to forestall the Guangxu’s removal. But beyond publicity, some Baohuanghui newspapers took an activist role in inflaming, if not creating, political movements. Shi Bao, the Baohuanghui newspaper Liang started in Shanghai in , was founded to promote the party’s reform message inside China. With its graphically interesting and more readable layout, satirical cartoons complete with caricatures, proactive reporting and political editorials, and serialized novels, Shi Bao looked and read differently from other Chinese newspapers.164 In , it became the mouthpiece of the anti-American boycott with daily coverage of the boycott and calls to action. Less known was how Shi Bao editors helped to initiate what became China’s first mass political movement, a topic explored in detail in Chapter 6.
The seeds of the boycott were planted during Liang’s final days in San Francisco in November , when he helped draft a petition—no doubt in the form of a circular telegram—signed by “more than 100,000 people in more than one hundred American cities” through the Six Companies (Zhonghua Huiguan).165 The petition described the rigors of U.S. exclusion laws for Chinese and asked Qing foreign affairs officials to refuse to renew the soon to expire U.S.–China exclusion treaty. In his letter to Los Angeles Baohuanghui leaders, Liang referred to a public letter he wrote refuting exclusion; it might have been this petition, or perhaps a much-circulated essay, Huagong Jinyue Ji (Notes on the Exclusion of Chinese Laborers) that was published in Xinmin Congbao soon after his return to Japan.166 This essay was reprinted as a pamphlet during the anti-American boycott.167 Liang’s extensive experience in Chinese American communities lent credibility to his detailed descriptions of the Exclusion policy.
A succession of transnational political movements, such as the anti-Japanese boycott and the constitutional petition movement of –10 (detailed in Chapters 10 and 11), were organized by the Baohuanghui in a similar fashion, using newspapers to influence public opinion on the sometimes complex issues behind these movements, disseminate petitions, and support fundraising efforts.
Educating a new generation of reformers loomed large in the strategies of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the Baohuanghui core leadership having largely come from the students of Kang’s Wanmucaotang in the s. Thus, Liang’s Los Angeles charter specified “raising funds to establish schools and support our association’s youth to go abroad to study so that they will become useful talents for the future.”168
Liang’s cohort of fellow students followed him into exile in Japan after the Hundred Days’ reforms, and some became teachers at Liang’s famous Datong (Great Unity) schools, Datong Xuexiao in Yokohama and Tokyo or Tongwen Xuexiao (Common Culture School) in Kōbe.169 These schools were the most-distinguished successors to Kang’s Wanmucaotang, sharing a curriculum and teaching style that combined Confucianism and Western-style education but now focused on motivating and training political activists. Liang dispatched a constant stream of graduates (both men and women) and their teachers to distant posts where they taught in Baohuanghui schools, managed newspapers, or worked in Baohuanghui companies, such as Shanghai’s Guangzhi Shuju (Diffusion of Knowledge Publishing House). The demand far exceeded the supply, as Liang explained in when Canadian members asked for a few experienced Datong or Tongwen teachers to come to Canada. The best candidates, Liang told them, were occupied with more critical activities in China, Macau, and Japan, and an assignment to Canada would have to wait. As for the students, they had to graduate before being asked to take on new responsibilities. And when they did finish, Liang contended, they would most likely be needed to carry out “our movement and activities” inside China because “we have many opportunities but have to weigh our options. We have to keep them confidential and cannot discuss them in this letter.”170 The confidential plans Liang intimated in his letter no doubt included what came to be known as the Guangdong Rising of –3, a conspiracy among reformers including Liang, Yung Wing, and Ou Jujia; revolutionaries; and secret society members to seek Guangdong’s independence and then use it as a base to establish a republican form of government.171
During his time in the United States, Liang openly advocated for the Guangdong Public School in a public letter he wrote in San Francisco. This prospective school in Guangzhou would teach the children of members’ families remaining in China and was first promoted by Baohuanghui leader Xu Qin, who had repeatedly solicited donations for it from overseas Chinese as early as . The school finally opened in with ninety students, more than doubled its enrollment in , and made plans to purchase seventeen mu (2.62 acres) of land.172
The Baohuanghui network of schools began in Japan, Guangdong, and Macau and expanded rapidly from onward, not only in North America (Vancouver, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Francisco, and New York) but also in Southeast Asia (Burma, Java, Penang, and Singapore, including schools specifically for girls); Honolulu, Hawaiʻi (Mun Lun School or Minglun Liangdeng Xuetang, founded in and still thriving); and Hankou, Hubei (a short-lived college of law and politics—Jianghan Gongxue—established during the flowering of the constitutional movement in ). Schools were comparatively expensive to establish and required trained teachers comfortable with a less-formal teaching style and Sino-Western curriculum.173 It took several years to assemble funds and personnel before opening school doors. The New York City school, one of the Patriotic Academies (Aiguo Xuetang or Oikwok Hoktong), opened in and solicited students from the northeast region through advertisements in Zhongguo Weixin Bao, offering room and board for $12 a month.174 Liang Wenqing was sent from the Datong School to teach the morning Chinese classes, and an American teacher was hired to teach English in the afternoon. Both boys and girls attended, and night classes in Chinese and English were offered to adults for $1 a month. The school principals were local Baohuanghui leaders, whose duties included continuous fundraising.175
Baohuanghui school curricula mirrored the organization’s values and goals, distinguishing the schools from others in local Chinatowns. Historian Belinda Huang notes that “the Baohuanghui network of paramilitary and elementary schools transformed the educational and political landscape in Chinese North America.” They introduced such timely subjects as Qing current affairs and a more flexible style of teaching, all the while attempting to build “new citizens” who were strong physically, morally, and intellectually and dedicated to the reform cause.176 Huang describes how Baohuanghui schools in North America broke with Chinese tradition: “Although they continued to emphasize literacy in Classical Chinese, knowledge of Confucian texts, and Confucian ethics, they were among the first institutions inside and outside of China to weave physical education, scientific knowledge, and even domestic arts into the curriculum.” In her examination of Baohuanghui schools in San Francisco, Vancouver, and Victoria, Huang discovered that instructors used such teaching aids as maps, picture charts, and animal rhymes alongside age-graduated textbooks to teach history and Chinese philology written by Chen Zibao, a Kang disciple and early educational reformer.177 In keeping with Kang’s egalitarian ethos, Chen advocated universal literacy and education for women and designed his textbooks with these goals in mind: “He deliberately chose easily accessible everyday topics that might interest his elementary readers, such as family relations, food, music, and clothing, and he employed easy to understand language, often in the Cantonese vernacular, colloquially spoken, and even in rhymes, to appeal to his audience, an approach very different from the dry and one-book-fits-all-one mentality of previous educators,” according to Huang. From North America, these progressive methods of teaching Chinese language and culture disseminated to Baohuanghui schools worldwide.
The Western Military Academy was unique to North America. One of Kang’s enduring criticisms of the Qing court was its inadequate military preparations. He insisted that “if the nation doesn’t prepare itself [for war], then the people must prepare themselves.” Not coincidently, this was part of Kang’s tribute to the Los Angeles-based Western Military Academy written in January after receiving a photo of drilling cadets.178
In his Los Angeles charter, Liang Qichao had mandated activities “to cultivate the military qualifications of citizens,” a clear reference to the academy founded early in in Los Angeles by Homer Lea, a self-proclaimed American military strategist who had won the trust of Baohuanghui leaders to organize a military training program for Chinese cadets taught by American military veterans. In the Baohuanghui charter, Kang referred directly to “the more than twenty Academies” and states that the local Baohuanghui chapters and academy principals would select the top graduates for further study in American military schools to prepare them to be “future commanders and leaders,” to be paid for by the Baohuanghui headquarters.179 Full treatment of the Western Military Academy is in Chapter 4.
Both Kang and Liang said that only persons who had studied abroad were capable of shouldering the responsibility for China’s future.180 Thus a top priority for the Baohuanghui was developing a cadre of young reformers competent in naval and military tactics, science, technology, government, law, business, and finance, which could only be accomplished by study in Japan, North America, or Europe. Liang’s Los Angeles charter, as well as Kang’s and organizational constitutions, reiterated the urgency of this task and the need to raise funds to support it. A handful of people, including Xu Qin, Liang Qichao, Kuang Shoumin (Kuang Shouwen), Tom Leung, and Kang Youwei collected personal and Baohuanghui funds, arranged the transnational logistics for the students—from making travel arrangements to meeting immigration regulations and selecting appropriate schools abroad—and communicated with one another to coordinate this program. Once the students were abroad, overseas members hosted them in their homes, monitored their studies, involved them in Baohuanghui activities, and, in a few cases, elicited long-term and dangerous commitments from them, including assassination and participation in uprisings. Funds came from local chapter donations, the Commercial Corporation and its subsidiaries, and Baohuanghui headquarters in Hong Kong.
Tom Leung in Los Angeles had the greatest responsibility for supporting students abroad and conceived of an unusual method of funding their studies. Perhaps noting the popularity of lavish Chinese restaurants patronized by Americans, Tom successfully persuaded Kang that it would be possible to pay for student expenses abroad with profits from such a restaurant. With Kang’s approval and initial investment, Tom opened King Joy Lo (Qiongcailou) in the Chicago Loop in , a restaurant that was both larger than its competitors and profitable enough to survive for twenty years. Yet, in its first three years, only $7,500 appears to have been allocated for payments to fewer than twenty students (see Chapter 9).181 Baohuanghui chapters also donated funds for study abroad. Belinda Huang examined account books for Baohuanghui’s San Francisco headquarters from to , which show income from local chapters subsidizing tuition for thirteen people (all men except for Kang Tongbi), with payments ranging from $100 to $1,000.182
Other Baohuanghui leaders advocated that the Baohuanghui give the highest priority to funding education abroad. In , journalist Liu Zhenlin argued, “Because the traditional examination system has been abolished and a constitutional government is not far away, the future will belong to the students … I would like to suggest that our party send more members abroad to study and prepare for the future. If we don’t, we will not be able to play any role in the political arena and will be eliminated by natural selection.”183 Liu’s suggestion that a dedicated fund be set up for study abroad was never accepted. That year, Liang Wenqing, who taught at the New York City Patriotic Academy, recommended the diversion of Commercial Corporation profits to support students rather than reinvesting in business projects, because the goals of the reformers were political and not business-oriented. Liang stressed military and naval studies, so that when the students returned to China and scattered throughout the provinces taking leadership positions they would provide a base of trained military men to support a reform-oriented government when it came to power. According to Baohuanghui party historian Wu Xianzi, Kang wanted to implement this idea but concluded it was not practical, since the investors wanted to make money and did not necessarily share the activists’ political motivations.184 In actuality, as will be shown, Commercial Corporation investments were frequently diverted to nonbusiness projects, when financial demands overcame Kang’s intention to separately finance and administer business and general organizational activities.
The increasingly elastic boundaries between Baohuanghui business and political or educational arms had not yet emerged in , when Liang Qichao was in North America. But the Commercial Corporation as a formal entity was fashioned in part by Liang during this trip. Its complexity and huge financial burdens were emblematic of Baohuanghui power, appeal and overreach.185
As recounted in Chapter 1, in Ye En and other Chinese Canadian merchants publicly announced the formation of a large commercial conglomerate for Chinese investors, attempting to jumpstart an idea that Kang had discussed with them before he departed for Europe in early May that year. Only a few days after Kang left British Columbia, the Daily Colonist (Victoria) reported that Kang and the Vancouver Chinese “are figuring on a scheme of gigantic proportions, namely a combine of Oriental trade in Canada, the United States, and Australia.”186 Sixty million dollars in stocks were to be sold by companies to be founded by Kang, who was quoted as overoptimistically estimating that five million Chinese lived in these three countries and Canadian Chinese alone would buy five million dollars in shares. However, upon Kang’s return to Canada and the founding of the Baohuanghui in July , the organization lost most of its commercial qualities.
This submersion of commercial goals was only temporary. The first indications of this followed Liang Qichao’s trip to Australia from October to May , giving speeches and observing political, cultural, and economic conditions.187 After Liang departed, the Chinese merchants in Sydney who had invited him to Australia convened a series of meetings to establish nonpartisan chambers of commerce. The resultant New South Wales Chinese Chamber of Commerce (Huashanghuishe), in turn, supported the Tung Wah Times and promoted Baohuanghui programs. Among the goals of the new chamber of commerce was to develop a common approach among the disparate Chinese Australian businesses in New South Wales and a unified response to the anti-Chinese sentiment, as the White Australia policy became law, effectively ending further Chinese immigration and blocking access to naturalized citizenship to all but White immigrants.188
By Liang Qichao was already directly operating or overseeing a growing network of Baohuanghui newspapers and publishing companies in Asia. Although most income for these businesses came from book and newspaper sales or large handouts from general organizational coffers, shares had been previously sold for Guangzhi Shuju. Founded in spring in Shanghai, the company translated and published books for the voracious readers of “new studies” (xinxue or Western political, social and economic thought) who bought whatever was published, causing books to sell out the first day they went on sale.189 Sounding like Kang would years later when talking about his Mexican investments, “no other business is as lucrative as publishing,” wrote Liang in August . “Now there are more than ten new publishing firms in Shanghai. The reason why we can outperform them is because of my reputation.” Liang feared competition from his better capitalized competitors, rising rents (“we are held hostage because they [the landlords] see our business is so good”), striking printers, and a shortage of paper. Liang suggested that the Baohuanghui buy its own building for the press and, even more optimistically, open a paper mill and invite Japanese experts to help manufacture “foreign-style” paper, which would be in great demand throughout China. “We need more capital so that we can overwhelm [the competitors] financially and stay on top,” claimed Liang, who at first proposed either raising more shares or allocating 80,000 to 100,000 yuan from the soon to be established Commercial Corporation.190 In his next letter to members, Liang promoted the paper mill as “the best business to make big money,” and since it required more than 200,000 yuan in start-up capital, “it would be wonderful if the [Commercial Corporation] could be established.”191
While Liang plunged the Baohuanghui headlong into the bubbling Shanghai publishing market, Kang was developing the justification and organizational structure for a Chinese “East India Company.” The Commercial Corporation’s original concept and draft charter envisioned massive overseas Chinese investment in China. Such investment, according to one account, was needed to compete for profits with the foreigners who were “seizing rights to such businesses as banks, railroads, mines, overseas transportation and shipping, and foreign exchange.”192 In fall , Kang issued the draft charter for the Commercial Corporation to Chinese communities throughout the world to solicit their comments, stressing that “the establishment of the Commercial Corporation is the most important thing to which you should give your attention.”193 Kang wrote Li Fuji and his compatriots in Victoria: “The Commercial Corporation is the base for saving our country. Please do not give up and let foreigners take it.”194
Kang was impetuous by nature and often urged haste over caution. While he was against the overthrow of the Qing regime through violent revolution, he was revolutionary in his thinking on how best to save China. Thus, in November he wrote to Li Fuji: “China is facing urgent change and calamity. How can we take our time and wait until it is too late? If we dwell on too many considerations, nothing can be done. Doubts would hinder the establishment of the Commercial Corporation.”195
Doubts were not in evidence when Liang Qichao arrived in Canada the next spring, charged with establishing the Commercial Corporation as a going concern. Li Fuji, Ye En, and other Vancouver and Victoria Baohuanghui leaders worked with Liang to revise the bylaws drafted by Kang and Hong Kong headquarters personnel He Suitian and Wang Jueren (Wang Jingyu, Wang Jingru).196 A revised charter for the Chinese Commercial Corporation, or Zhongguo Shangwu Gongsi, was issued in late in the form of a one-page document, “Concise Rules for Soliciting Shares for the Chinese Commercial Corporation” (Zhongguo Shangwu Gongsi Zhaogu Jianming Zhangcheng), in the names of Kang as supervisor (duban) and Liang as deputy supervisor (fuduban).197
The “Concise Rules” presented a vision of China as the factory of the world and Hong Kong as entrepôt, with Chinese overseas managing an international supply chain linking New York and other cities through control of banks, shipping, warehousing, and marketing, foreshadowing much later investments in China by Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan. There is no mention of newspapers or publishing companies, which were to consume much of the Commercial Corporation capital.
An unusually detailed and widely published news story about a “Chinese Mercantile Company” appeared while Liang was still in the United States, datelined Seattle, October 23, . It quoted a Seattle Baohuanghui leader and businessman Woo Gen (Hu Zhen, Hu Ba’nan) and described Baohuanghui plans to organize a $25 million company to promote trade between the United States and China with headquarters in Hong Kong and an office in New York. Woo said he would soon leave for Hong Kong to help launch the company, which would engage in banking, import/export, and farming a large plot of land in Guangdong; incorporate the existing Shanghai book publishing firm; and fund an endowment for an American-style college in Guangzhou. The article claimed that at least $1 million was to come from Chinese in the United States, but even more from India, including $300,000 from one Chinese merchant. Woo said: “We believe that one of the strongest influences in building up China will be through close trade relations with America, whereby we can draw the lessons we need from this country. That is one of the objects of the Chinese Mercantile Company. Of course its first object is to make money, but while we are doing that we will help the reform work in China.”198 Woo Gen’s publicity for the “Chinese Mercantile Company” set the stage for great expectations on all sides and for Kang’s trip to North America in one year. Apart from his predictions for how much investment would be raised by the Baohuanghui, all of the projects he announced came to pass save an operating import/export company—among them, a Guangdong land reclamation pro-ject (Xuwen Kenwu Gongsi), the Guangdong Public School, and banks in New York, Torreón, Hong Kong, Penang, and Guangdong.199 In December, Woo Gen sailed for Asia on the Iyo Maru “to participate in the organization of the Chinese Mercantile Company.”200 He attended the Hong Kong organizing meeting of the Commercial Corporation in March along with Kang, Liang, and others, and was made one of the officers.201
This grand vision for the Commercial Corporation, as portrayed by Woo Gen, had not materialized by early when Kang arrived in the United States. The bulk of the corporation’s businesses were newspapers, including the newly established Shi Bao in Shanghai and Shang Bao in Hong Kong, and the existing translation publishing company, Guangzhi Shuju in Shanghai (sometimes called Yishu Ju or Translation Bureau). Rice brokerages in Penang and Singapore began operations in , but banks had not yet been set up.202 After only a month in the United States, Kang discovered for himself how difficult it was to sell stock shares and admitted that “people in these cities have no certainty of earning money in this business, and as a result, I cannot persuade them with my empty words.”203
Kang’s draft charter states the intention to raise 120 million yuan in shares (presumably Hong Kong dollars), a target that must have seemed unobtainable a few months later.204 The “Concise Rules” instead declared that “this company has prepared capital of 10 million yuan divided into 500,000 shares, each share 20 yuan, received in Hong Kong banknotes (yinzhi).”205 In spring , Li Fuji in Victoria reported to North American Baohuanghui members that Liang Qichao’s persuasive speeches about “the righteousness of our cause” had brought spectacular results—more popular enthusiasm and new members than ever before. Moreover, Li said, the Chinese in Vancouver and Victoria had bought $50,000 to $60,000 of Commercial Corporation shares and predicted that “$2 million in shares will not be difficult to raise.”206 But this proved unrealistic. Wu Xianzi reported that Liang collected less than $600,000 in the United States and Canada by the time he left in November , and American and Canadian newspaper reports describe contributions Liang received from “two-thirds of the residents of San Francisco Chinatown coming to $150,000.207 Although the “Concise Rules” mandated the selling of more Commercial Corporation shares between January and February , Tom Leung, in a May public letter, written on Kang’s authorization, intimated that this was not done. He said, “Our Commercial Corporation raised only one-tenth of the funds we estimated that we would at the beginning.”208 Although Kang and others were also recruiting shareholders in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and even in China, it is not known how much they contributed to Commercial Corporation capital compared to the initial investments from North America.209 Kang had anticipated the United States would be his “Gold Mountain” for selling stock shares and even delayed his departure from Canada until he received the specially printed stock share certificates from London via New York where Luo Chang had sent them.210
Kang’s first trips to the United States and Mexico in opened doors to new investments in North America—banks, a restaurant, real estate, and a streetcar line—which took funds and energy away from the Commercial Corporation’s original focus on business in China. Kang’s speculations in Mexico were encouraged both by his Chinese compatriots there and at least one American benefactor, Charles Ranlett Flint, known at the time as the “Father of the Trusts.” The full story and ultimate scope of the Commercial Corporation as well as the troubles it wrought for Kang and the Baohuanghui will be treated in later chapters.
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Motivating Baohuanghui members to play an active role in the organization was foremost in the minds of Kang and his protégés—whether by donating their hard-earned cash, investing in stock shares, buying membership badges, attending speeches or Chinese-language classes, or risking their lives as political assassins or warriors inside China. The greatest sacrifice was also among the most attractive to fervent nationalists, and Kang’s many (well-publicized) escapes from death no doubt inspired members, both men and women, to follow in his appeals. As the next chapter will explore in depth, violent and militaristic means were part of the Baohuanghui program.
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