CHAPTER XXXVII

CHINESE SECRET SOCIETIES
The first secret society in China is said to have been founded by three heroes of the period of the Three King¬ doms (a.d. 221-264) who in response to a call for volunteers from the last Han Emperor met on a certain day in a peach orchard, where they burnt incense, sacrificed a black ox and a white horse, and bound themselves by an oath to be faithful unto death. In the subsequent wars one of them, Kuan Yii, was slain, and thirteen centuries later he was deified, under the name of Kuan Kung, as the god of war, and the apotheosis of loyalty to a sworn brother, for which reasons he was adopted as the tutelary deity of all secret societies.1
“Secret societies in China, as in other countries, have had their origin sometimes in political circumstances, and some¬ times in the desire to maintain a craft, propagate a doctrine or to advance some object of philanthropy. In China however, they have long abounded.”2
From the seventeenth century on most of the Chinese secret societies have had political objects and been directed against the Manchu dynasty, which dethroned the Ming dynasty in 1644. The doctrines of a certain seventeenth- century philosopher named Huang Li-Chou gave them a bias against the accepted ideas of the Divine Right of the Emperor ; and the latter ritual of the Hung 3 or Triad
1 T’ang Leang-Li, The Liner History of the Chinese Revolution, London, 1930.
2 John Kesson, The Cross and the Dragon, London, 1854.
3 T’ang says that the name Hung was applied to this society from the name of Chu Hung-Wu, the first Ming Emperor, a national hero. The society has borne many names at different times, San Ho Hui, Triad Society, Tien Ti Hui, Society of Heaven and Earth, and Ko Lao Hui, Society of Brothers and Elders.
305
306 famous secret societies
Society certainly contained ideas which can only be de¬ scribed as communistic. The early secret societies consisted only of peasants, coolies, and bad characters. Propaganda was carried on by means of travelling troupes of actors who presented plays calculated to rouse the discontent of the masses. The better-class Chinese shunned these societies, and consequently remained for the most part cut off from the revolutionary movements which they later originated; they drew their strength from the people, and they provided their members with present help in time of trouble, irrespective of whether the need for it arose from the misfortune or fault or crime of the brother who claimed their help.
During the reign of the Emperor Khang-he (1669-1722) frequent insurrections took place that were due to secret societies formed with the object of overthrowing the Manchu dynasty, and these were not suppressed without trouble. The Emperor Kien-long (1735-1800) experienced revolts in the southern provinces due to a similar cause ; for through¬ out the domination of the Manchu dynasty it was detested by the Chinese. Some of these political societies were known as the “Red Beards,” “White Jackets,” “Short Swords,” “Society of the Water-lily,” and the “Sea and Land Society;” but the most formidable of all was the Pe-lin-kiao or “White Lily Society.” In 1774 the last-named organized a rebellion in the province of Chang- tong, the leaders being a certain Wang-lung and a priest named Fan-ui. A high Government official got wind of the plot and sent soldiers to arrest Wang-lung, but “one of the soldiers appointed to this duty happened also to be a Pe-lin-kiao, and gave timely warning to Wang-lung, his chief, of his danger.” The conspirator took time by the forelock, attacked first, captured the city of Shoo-chang-hien, and slew its governor who had planned his arrest. Wang- lung then proclaimed himself Emperor, and cost the Em¬ peror Kien-long a great deal of trouble and the expenditure of nearly 100,000 lives before the pretender was defeated and slain. In 1777 the Pe-lin-kiao broke out again, but were promptly put down by an active viceroy.
CHINESE SOCIETIES
307
Under the Emperor Kia-king, who ascended the throne in 1800, a society called the Water-lilies attained a member¬ ship approaching a million in five great provinces; and another called the Wonderful Association was discovered in Peking itself. Yet another powerful society with aims hostile to the Manchu dynasty at this period was known as the Tsing-lien-kiao, which was supposed to be the Pe-lin- kiao under a new name. “This society, too, cursed the Emperor. The members of this sect are said to have refrained from animal food, wine, garlic and onions. They took fearful oaths to conceal their secrets from even their nearest relations. They met only at night, and in their meetings are said to have uttered fearful curses.” 1
It was in the time of the Emperor Kia-king (1800-20), too, that there arose in China a secret brotherhood under the name of Th’ien 2 Hauw Hoi’h, which being interpreted means “The Family of the Queen of Heaven.” It was a so-called triad society, composed of the disaffected of all classes, and aimed at a revolution. This society was rampant in the south of China, and extended its roots into Cochin-China, Siam, and Korea. In the year 1808 stern orders were issued to the magistrates to suppress it; but whatever steps they took were futile, for the society proceeded to become even more active under the new name of Th’ien Ti Hoi’h, meaning “The Brotherhood of Heaven and Earth,” sigifying in Chinese the three powers of nature: Heaven, Earth, Family. “The new name was happily chosen, as it had attractions for the rich as for the poor, and also for the literati; and the society grew with inconceivable rapidity. Heaven, earth, and family are the bases of Chinese philosophy and metaphysics, and to the humbler classes the mysterious name signified the equal right of all to participate in whatever the common father Heaven sends down, and the common mother Earth brings forth for all her children.”3
1 Kesson, Op. cit.
2 Th’ien has often been written Tong in English, and the society and its successors have frequently been referred to by this name.
3 Kesson, ut sup.
308 famous secret societies
This society was also known by the name of San-ho-hoih, as the Hung1 or Hong-Kia (Flood Family), and by other titles as well. Its headquarters were in the southern provinces of Canton and Fo-kien, whence it spread to Malacca, Java, and wherever the Chinese emigrant might penetrate. Its objects were political, the overthrow of the Manchu and restoration of the Ming dynasty. Its outward manifesta¬ tions were the violation of the law, tampering with witnesses, and screening malefactors. Its esoteric doctrine was to destroy the fearful contrast between misery and excessive wealth, and to free the world from oppression and misery, ideals only to be achieved by unity, courage and enterprise. Members were therefore encouraged to win new recruits, and to bide their time for a revolt, until the hour when the majority of the people had become oath-bound to the society.
“The members of the Heaven and Earth Brotherhood have many advantages. The Hoi’h has some features in common with European freemasonry. It relieves distressed brethren; and the magical grip and pass-word instantly commend a hungry brother to the hospitality of his wealthier comrade. This enables the Hoi’h to spread itself abroad, and to strike its roots into the most distant provinces of the empire, and at the same time renders it more dangerous to all regular Governments; for the brotherhood makes itself known and felt beyond the bounds proper of China.”2 As soon as Chinese immigrants arrived in a foreign territory, the Brotherhood sent envoys to invite them to join the order; if they declined, they were persecuted; but the advantages offered by the society were great enough to render much pressure unnecessary.
When Kesson described the society such as it was in 1854, its headquarters were supposed to be situated somewhere indefinite in southern China. The directing power centred in three persons, known as the Koh, Hiong and Thi, that is the Elder and Younger Brothers. These three chiefs were dictators, but the three leading members of each city or
1 Chinese names are spelt by English writers in a variety of ways, and these phonetics differ again from the French or German.
2 Kesson, ut sup.
CHINESE SOCIETIES 309
province assumed the same titles as marks of honour and local authority, though themselves responsible to the supreme heads of the order. The members were bound by oath, with death as the penalty of any breach of it. This oath was taken by the neophyte kneeling in front of an idol under three swords, held over his head by the Younger Brothers in the form of a triangle. The oath consisted of thirty-six clauses, the most important of which ran: “I swear that I shall know neither father nor mother, nor brother nor sister, nor wife nor child; but the brotherhood alone. Where the brotherhood leads or pursues, there I shall pursue or follow; its foe shall be my foe.”
The neophyte after taking the oath cut his finger with a knife and allowed three drops of blood to fall into a cup filled with arrack; the same thing was done by the Elder and Younger Brothers; after which they with the neophyte each drank from the cup, and therewith the ceremony of initiation was complete.
An alternative method of ratifying the oath was for the neophyte to strike off the head of a white cock, which had the emblematic significance:
“As sure as a white (pure) soul dwells in this white cock, so sure shall it dwell in me; and as sure as I have ventured to hew off the head of the white cock with the white soul, so surely shall I lose my head if I prove untrue; and, as sure as this cock has lost his head, shall all those lose their heads who are untrue to the brotherhood or who are its active foes.”
The rules of the society were thirty-six in number, many of them exhorting to brotherly love and practical benevo¬ lence, and each attended by a curse invoked on the head of him who failed to observe them. A few examples will illustrate the matter.
“If a brother be poor, you must help him; otherwise, may you die on the road.”
“A brother must nourish another brother; if you have food, you must share it with him; if you do not, may a tiger devour you.”
310 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
“He who commits adultery with a brother’s wife, let him be run through with a sword.”
“He who mentions the thirty-six oaths of the brother¬ hood must have two hundred and sixteen strokes of the red wood.”
There was also another series of thirty-six articles which the brotherhood had to observe. Members were in them admonished to beware of divulging the customs of the society; to be industrious; to avoid theft; to lend to the poor; to support the sick; to take care of a brother’s house in his absence; to restore property stolen from a brother; to entertain strange brethren; to assist to bury a poor brother; to give alms; not to despise a poor brother, nor to make his distress matter for gossip; and not to take a bribe to arrest a brother. These were very commendable; but not so the following: “If a brother commits murder or any great crime, you must not deliver him into arrest, but afford him the means of escape from the country. In case of the intended arrest of a brother, or any evil likely to befall him, give him timely warning, and discover not his place of retreat.”
The members were known to one another by certain signs, into which the number three invariably entered. Each brother was provided with a copy of the “Chop” or seal of the society, printed in coloured characters on silk or calico. “It is worn by many as a species of charm, and great care is taken to conceal the meaning of its characters from the uninitiated. ... It is of a pentagonal form, partly representing the five cardinal virtues of the Chinese, as benevolence, justice, wisdom, faithfulness and richness; and partly signifying their astronomical science, whose basis is the five planets.” 1
A member of the Brotherhood of Heaven and Earth had to conceal the names of all connected with it, and to yield implicit obedience. He was supposed to endeavour to advance the interests of the society, with all his heart and soul and mind. Trusty brethren would be supplied with
1 Kesson, Op. cit. Where also will be found an illustration of this “Chop” and a full explanation of its characters.
CHINESE SOCIETIES
31 1
money, if it were needed to forward these objects; but “talkative, hare-brained, and suspected members were got rid of by poison.”
The sinister activities of the Triad Society or Brotherhood of Heaven and Earth became matter of public knowledge during the Taiping rebellion in China (1850-65). The Taipings arose in the province of Kwangsi in Southern China about the year 1848. For a year or two previous a religious brotherhood known as the God-worshippers had been training a militia to cope with the local bandits. The God-worshippers had adopted an orientalized form of Christianity as their religion, and their founder claimed to receive divine revelations from on high; but in 1848 the leadership of the sect was seized by two men named Yang and Hsiao, and from that moment the aims of the society became openly revolutionary and directed against the Imperial Government. The movement was reinforced by all kinds of discontented elements, including the secret societies. While it was largely recruited in the beginning from the T’ien Ti Hui (the Triads), other brotherhoods with strange names also came to join it. The United Sons, the Red and Black Society, the One Pinch of Perfume Society, such were a few of the bodies who had formed large bands containing dangerous outlaws. Some of these had fraternal or religious motives, but in others plunder was the main objective; for in China it has not been uncommon for original robber bands to develop into a secret society in times of public unrest, as was the case with the famous White Lilies (1 796-1 804). 1
The Chinese historian T’ang Leang-Li relates 2 a curious story which illustrates the complications that might arise in those days, when most of the soldiers on both sides belonged to some secret society or other. The Imperial general Tso Tsung-T’ang was marching to capture a notorious bandit chief. One day he noticed his army falling in and forming a long line along the road for several miles, and on making enquiries learned that the troops
1 William James Hail, Tseng Kuo-Fan and the Taiping Rebellion, New Haven, 1927. Richard Wilhelm, The Soul of China, 1928, confirms this statement.
2 The Chinese Revolution.
312 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
were preparing to receive with full honours a visit from the very bandit he had come to arrest. In the army, he was told, everyone from private to highest officer was a member of the Ko Lao Hui, and the bandit happened to be chief or Great Dragon Head of the society in that district from which the troops had been drawn. The only way in which the general was able to retain command of his army was to hold a full council of the society in the open air and declare himself the new Great Dragon Head of the Order; the sol¬ diers accepted him as such, and the business of the campaign was resumed.
As has been mentioned earlier, the Triad Society had a widely scattered membership, and was particularly strong in the south of China; it was but natural, therefore, that it should link up with any movement in that area directed against the Government. So it happened, and Lo Ta-Kang, a pirate and member of the Triad, was one of the leaders appointed to inaugurate the rebellion in 1851 in Kwangsi; while at first the whole strength of the society was employed to further the revolt. For the first couple of years the Triads were the sinews of the movement; but then they began to secede, and some even joined the Imperial forces. While the Taipings were in possession of Nanking, the Triads for three years, 1853 to 1856, commanded Shanghai, and prolonged negotiations took place with the object of linking up once more their power with that of the main body of the rebels ; but owing to the intransigeance of the religious fanatics who were in command at Nanking, the two bodies never became reunited.1
As for the Taipings themselves, they seem to have been a religious and not a secret society. Their founder had evolved a weird kind of Protestantism, and he and successive leaders asserted that they received revelations from God the Father and Jesus Christ in moments of crisis. Hung, one of their chiefs, on being captured in April, 1852, by the Imperialists, made a full confession, which, if true, shows the extent to which the revolt had depended upon other than religious elements. He asserted that he had
1 Hail, Op. cit.
CHINESE SOCIETIES
313
concocted the story of how the “Heavenly Brother Jesus ” came down to speak to him, so as to bind the members of the Triad Society still closer to him. 1 He added, that everyone who had joined the Triads in Kwang-tung had by that initiation become an adherent of the Taiping movement. 2
There seems little doubt that the Triads, or similar secret societies, were responsible for a great deal of the trouble caused to the authorities of the United States by the Chinese resident there. Under the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 the Chinese obtained the right of free immigration to the States, and made such good use of it that by the year 1880 their numbers had become a menace to the white population. San Francisco was the usual port of entry, and in this city six flourishing Chinese corporations made immi¬ gration easy for the coolie and profitable for themselves. Their method was to secure advance contracts for the labourers, provide money for their passage to America, and when they had arrived there keep them in subjection until they had repaid the uttermost farthing with appropriate oriental interest. Needless to say, these corporations of slave¬ owners, for that was what they really amounted to, enforced their rights over the coolies not by means of the laws of the United States, but by more typically celestial methods copied from the customs of the Brotherhood of Heaven and Earth. These contract companies, corporations, or soci¬ eties, whatever the name be that is given them, employed gangs of ruffians known as Highbinders to spy upon the immigrant Chinese and to persecute them in various ways if they did not fulfil their contracts to the letter. The result was that these scoundrels plied their trade merrily at San Francisco, and the State of California, where there were no fewer than 161,000 Chinese in subjection to the
1 The so-called Christian adherents of the Taiping were, to put the matter mildly, unorthodox. Sun-Yat-Sen’s father became a nominal Christian when he joined the Taiping rebels, and remained so throughout his life; but this profession of faith did not prevent him from paying due reverence to the heathen gods of his village.
1 Hail, Op. cit. As for the origin of the name Taiping, it arose when Hung- Siu-Tsuen, sometime leader of the rebels, assumed the name of King Taiping, signifying Great Peace.
314 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
sinister Six. Every Chinese in all these thousands, whether labourer, artizan, or prostitute, for the Big Six imported any whose craft promised profit, was certain to be black¬ mailed periodically by their police, the Highbinders, and as certain to be murdered by them if they proved too vocal in the process of being squeezed.1
The scandal of this traffic has been removed by subsequent legislation affecting the immigration laws of the United States, but the name Highbinder is still a word of ill-omen in that country.
The Hung or Hong or Triad Society was established in many districts of the United States by these Chinese im¬ migrants. When Sun-Yat-Sen visited these Hung Societies in America in 1896 2 he was greatly disappointed to find that they had forgotten their original revolutionary and communistic principles and had largely degenerated into mutual benefit societies, because living in a free country they had naturally lost their original political colour. Their avowed object was still to restore the Ming dynasty in China, but few, if any, had the remotest idea what this portion of the ritual meant. Some years later a pro¬ tracted revolutionary propaganda was carried on among these Hung Societies in America by emissaries from Sun- Yat-Sen’s various organizations, and after several years of this kind of work they were at last brought to realize that they existed for the purpose of revolution.
Some of their members, indeed, seem to have relearnt their lesson only too well. A French eye-witness of the scenes that took place in Canton after the establishment of the Republic in 1 9 1 1 has described 3 how a society known as the Black Hand and consisting of Chinese who had lived in the United States conducted a house-to-house search, accompanied by much looting, for reactionaries, and acted as detectives, police, judges and executioners. The particular objects of their pursuit were members of an Imperialistic secret society ; and to be found in possession of
1 Vide The Chinese in California. San Francisco, 1880. Published anonymously. Name of author in B.M. Catalogue given as G. B. Densmore.
2 Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary.
3 Jean Rodes, Seines de la vie revolutionnaire en Chine. Paris, 1917.
CHINESE SOCIETIES
315
its medal with the inscription “Protection of the Monarchy 55 entailed instant execution by the Black Hand.
The beggars of China, while not a secret society in the strict sense of the term, have yet in some aspects such a resemblance to the Camorra of Naples as to be worth a short description. In every city they constitute a regular gild to which only the men may belong. According to Richard Wilhelm,1 they used to have a beggar king who was recognized by the municipality, and to this potentate the ordinary beggars had to pay tithes into a common fund, which he redistributed at regular intervals among the whole fraternity. To this day shop-keepers are periodically canvassed for alms, a form of blackmail which is invariably paid, lest worse should befall in the form of arson or forcible entry. The larger shops pay a fixed sum to some specified agent of the beggars in order to save their customers the annoyance of seeing Lazarus displaying his sores in their vicinity; but other merchants prefer to distribute the largesse personally to the beggar after having kept him waiting in the street for a length of time suited to the oc¬ casion. The notice “May you have great joy and hap¬ piness” placarded on a shop is not a polite wish addressed to the passer-by or customer, but a sign that the shop-keeper is a regular subscriber to the Beggars’ Gild, and as such is not to be importuned by the needy.2
Even as in the days of Louis XI a harumscarum French scholar might, and in one notable instance did, become a henchman of the Roi des Thunes, so the son of an in¬ fluential Chinese family having failed in his exams may become one of the Flowery Ones, the beggars, and be seen by his respectable acquaintances wandering round the shops to collect the regular dole of cash paid on the 1st and 15th of each month, the beggars’ levy on the merchants, ready to pay it for the sake of peace. 3
Of all recent Chinese secret societies the one named by the Western races the Boxers is the most famous, because it
1 Soul of China, English translation, 1928.
2 A. S. Roe, Chance and Change in China, 1920.
3 Ibid.
3 1 6 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
came into prominence at the siege of the Legations in Peking in the summer of igoo.
It was a product of the northern provinces, where in many places societies existed for self-protection against the depre¬ dations of robbers who terrorized the surrounding country¬ side. These institutions for self-help called themselves I Ho T’uan, Union for the Protection of Public Peace, which title was later changed to I Ho Ch’uan, The Fist for the Protection of Public Peace. 1 The Chinese characters were wrongly translated by the word Boxer. A Chinese historian 2 states that the Boxers for the greater part belonged to the Ta Tao Hui, Big Knife Society, and the Pai Lien Chiao, White Lily Society, whose original war cry was “Blot out the Manchus and all foreign things.” The Imperial Government, however, cleverly utilized the pres¬ ence of the foreigners in China as a lightning-conductor to divert the fury of the revolutionaries from the ruling dynasty; so that for some time before the siege of the Legations took place (June-August, 1900), Peking was filled with rumours of approaching massacres, and became the centre of a propaganda of hate, with the watchword, “Death to the Foreigners!”
The Boxers were largely a youth movement. An eye¬ witness noted during the attacks on the Legations that the fanatics leading the advancing columns to the assault were always individuals of from twelve to fifteen years of age, and that even young women were included in their ranks. 3
The meetings for initiation took place in the temples in an atmosphere of mystery and darkness visible ; the avowed aim of the ceremonial proceedings was to endow the neophyte with insensibility to pain and invulnerability. Fasting, incantations, and cabalistic gestures were superimposed on the recitation of invocations, incomprehensible even to
1 Richard Wilhelm, The Soul of China. J. J. Matignon, Superstition, Crime et Misere en Chine, Paris, 1902, translated the words as the League of Tied Fists, or The League of Concord and Harmony, and suggests that the initiates were known as Boxers because they devoted themselves to courses of gymnastics and physical culture.
a T’ang Leang-Li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution, London, 1930. For convenience’ sake this author will henceforth be referred to as T’ang.
3 Matignon, Op. cit.
CHINESE SOCIETIES 3 1 7
the initiated. The candidates were made to swallow drugs supposed to be universal panaceas, and charms written on red or orange paper were burnt to ashes, mixed with tea, and administered as a potion to render bullets harmless. The result of all this shamanism was to induce a state of hysteria which drove the patients temporarily out of their minds. Such hysteria is contagious, and the spread of it proved particularly favourable to the rapid recruiting of the Boxers and the development of this anti- foreign movement.1
The account given by another eye-witness of the movement tallies to a great extent with the foregoing. Richard Wilhelm2 states that the society was enveloped in a super¬ stitious atmosphere that incited to fanaticism. The votaries met at night in the temples under the mysterious sign of the god of all magic Chen Wu, ruler over all demons and spirits, and further invoked the protective god Kuanti, with his armed band of satellites, all of which deities ad¬ dressed those present by the voices of spiritualistic mediums. During the mystical ceremony of initiation the young men would fall as if dead, to rise up again filled with a savage courage, accepted members of the Union of the Great Knife, Ta Tao Hui, and, as they believed and a great many of their countrymen believed too, invulnerable against bullets or blows of the sword. This mass psychosis spread like an epidemic ; and since the movement had been diverted from its original goal of revolution, the Chinese Government gave it free scope against the foreigners, with results that are a milestone in Chinese history, but do not need to be retold here.
Though the Boxer movement took place in the north, it had repercussions in the South of China. In 1900 Sun-Yat-Sen, from his exile in Japan, had brought about the amalgamation of his secret society for the Regeneration of China with other secret societies existing in Kwantung and the Yangtse Valley, and thus had provided himself with a weapon. Accordingly, when news came of the progress
1 Ibid. Matignon saw the matter from the point of view of a psychiater.
* The Soul of China.
3 1 8 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
of the outbreak in Northern China, he hastened to co-operate in the revolt by directing insurrections at Huchow and Can¬ ton. These, however, achieved no success.1
The history of the most recent secret societies in China is closely bound up with that of this great revolutionary leader Sun-Yat-Sen (1866-1925). This is not the place to tell how the son of a poor peasant rose to become President of the Chinese Republic, nor of the novel structures composed of Western ideas which he attempted to erect on the ruins of the Celestial Empire; his work was cut short by death, nor has it been completed since then by his successors ; what concerns us now is that throughout his life as a professional revolutionist he had dealings with secret societies of all kinds. 2
During the latter half of the nineteenth century a change had taken place in the membership of the secret societies, which were now being joined by high officials and scholars, so it was natural that Sun, while a student at Canton Medical College in 1886, should become a member of the Ko Lao Hui, Society of Brothers and Elders. With friends acquired in this society he began to lay the foundations of his Hsin Chung Hui, Society for the Regeneration of China, whose watchword was, “Divine right does not last for ever.” This body was not actually launched till 1894, and its avowed aim then was, strangely enough, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy; yet this end was in itself an actual advance towards democracy from the traditional purpose of all former Chinese secret societies, the mere exchange of one absolute dynasty for another.
Sun was disappointed with the results of his new society, for it failed to attract the class of recruit he desired, so from Tokio he arranged, in the year 1899, a conference between the Hsin Chung Hui and the older Hung societies established in Kwantung, Kwangsi, Fukien and the Yangtse valley, the result of which was the federation of all these societies with Sun as leader of the group. Mention
1 Sun-Yat-Sen, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary. London, 1927.
J Those in search of more knowledge cannot do better than go to T’ang’s book, published by Routledge and Sons, 1930.
CHINESE SOCIETIES
319
has already been made of their first attempt at revolution which was to support the Boxer rising, and proved abortive.
The revolutionary movement spread rapidly in China after 1900, and Shanghai became the centre of very active propaganda. A group of well educated Chinese established themselves in the international settlement, and secure from interference by the Imperial Government deluged the country with inflammatory pamphlets, and this society of revolutionaries was known as the Ai-Kuo Hsiieh-Shih. The importance of such societies was waning in Sun’s estimation, and in the year 1904 he published a manifesto declaring his aim to be a Chinese Republic, and followed this declaration by the establishment in 1905 of a new organization designed to control them as a political weapon. He had devised no new idea, but consciously or unconsciously set himself to copy the example of numberless conspirators who have aimed at centralizing the directive power of a rebellion.
The full name of the new organization founded by Sun at Tokio in September, 1905, was the Chung-Kuo Ko-Ming Tung-Meng Hui, The United Revolutionary Party of China, but the term Ko-Ming, revolutionary, was at first discreetly omitted in public. As the title implied, the new body was a federation of several revolutionary societies, the Hsing Chung Hui, the Hua Hsin Hui, Association for the Modernization of China, and the Kuan Fu Hui, the Restoration Society. The first two had great influence with the secret societies in the south of China, which carried out the instructions passed on by these more intellectually controlled bodies. It is at once obvious what power for revolution would be wielded by any group of individuals directing the Tung Meng Hui, which guided all the subordinate groups.
The Tung Meng Hui had at first all the features of an ordinary secret society. Secrecy was enjoined, and penalties, ranging from censure to capital punishment, prescribed for breaches of the code of laws. The initiate took an oath to work for the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, the establishment of a Republic, and the redistribution of the
320 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
land in China. The headquarters were in Tokio and branches were founded in every district of China and every Chinese settlement in foreign lands, the functions of the latter branches being to carry on propaganda and collect funds for the League. It began to flourish exceedingly, both in funds and numbers; between 1907 and 19 11 membership increased from 10,000 to 300,000.
It is needless to recount the futile attempts at revolution directed by the Tung Meng Hui up to 1911. Then came success, the establishment of a Republic, and the assumption by Sun-Yat-Sen of its provisional Presidency on the 1st January, 1912, at Nanking, a post he held only till the following February, when he was succeeded by Yuan Shih-K’ai.
Sun saw that the continuance of the Tung Meng Hui as a secret revolutionary organization was incompatible with its exercising any political influence as a parliamentary party, so in March, 1912, he converted it into an open association and re-christened it the Kuo-Min Tang, the National People’s Party. Parliamentary success, however, was not destined to be the lot of its leader, and in November, 1913, Sun and his followers were expelled from the Legis¬ lative Assembly by the President Yuan, who had become a virtual dictator.
Sun thereupon set himself to found a new association, called the Chung-Hua Ko-Min Tang, Chinese Revolu¬ tionary Party, in which every member was required to take an oath of loyalty to Sun personally. It was a failure, and had ceased to exist in 1916.
In the autumn of 1920 he established yet another secret society to take its place. The new creation was known as the Chung-Kuo Kuo-Min Tang, National People’s Party of China, and in it the personal oath of loyalty to Sun was abolished. This society still exists. It was joined by many members of the Communist Party, which was formed by Mahlin, Lenin’s secretary, during a mission in China in 1921, and though these new recruits found it advisable at first to keep their political principles secret, this precaution became unnecessary when in January, 1923, an entente
CHINESE SOCIETIES
321
was reached between the Kuo-Min Tang and Soviet Russia. This entente came to an end in December, 1927.
In 1923 the Kuo-Min Tang was again reorganized, at the suggestion of Borodin, the Russian envoy, but the changes then devised belong solely to the history of Chinese politics. The party or society, whatever one pleases to call it, has survived its founder, and may for centuries to come exercise an influence over the destinies of China, whether as an open political movement or, in a not unnatural reversion to type, as a secret lever used for undermining the Govern¬ ment of the moment.
Since Sun-Yat-Sen’s death new secret societies have arisen in China with the traditional object of organizing opposition to rulers or their methods. Thus in 1925 there was founded at Canton a body known as the Wen Hua Tang of the usual esoteric kind which set out to become the opponent of the Kuo-Min Tang. The subsequent assass¬ ination of Liao Chung-Kai, a prominent leader in the latter society, was popularly ascribed to the action of the new secret association. Whether this be true or false, the mere appearance on the political horizon of such a sodality as the Wen Hua Tang will be warning to the weather-wise in statecraft of much more stormy weather yet to come.