When the empress Tz[)u] Hsi saw that the emperor was actually thinking about reforms, she went to work with lightning speed.  Very soon the reformers had to flee; those who failed to make good their escape were arrested and executed.  The emperor was made a prisoner in a palace near Peking, and remained a captive until his death; the empress resumed her regency on his behalf.  The period of reforms lasted only for a few months of 1898.  A leading part in the extermination of the reformers was played by troops from Kansu under the command of a Mohammedan, Tung Fu-hsiang.  General Yuean Shih-k’ai, who was then stationed at Tientsin in command of 7,000 troops with modern equipment, the only ones in China, could have removed the empress and protected the reformers; but he was already pursuing a personal policy, and thought it safer to give the reformers no help.

There now began, from 1898, a thoroughly reactionary rule of the dowager empress.  But China’s general situation permitted no breathing-space.  In 1900 came the so-called Boxer Rising, a new popular movement against the gentry and the Manchus similar to the many that had preceded it.  The Peking government succeeded, however, in negotiations that brought the movement into the service of the government and directed it against the foreigners.  This removed the danger to the government and at the same time helped it against the hated foreigners.  But incidents resulted which the Peking government had not anticipated.  An international army was sent to China, and marched from Tientsin against Peking, to liberate the besieged European legations and to punish the government.  The Europeans captured Peking (1900); the dowager empress and her prisoner, the emperor, had to flee; some of the palaces were looted.  The peace treaty that followed exacted further concessions from China to the Europeans and enormous war indemnities, the payment of which continued into the 1940’s, though most of the states placed the money at China’s disposal for educational purposes.  When in 1902 the dowager empress returned to Peking and put the emperor back into his palace-prison, she was forced by what had happened to realize that at all events a certain measure of reform was necessary.  The reforms, however, which she decreed, mainly in 1904, were very modest and were never fully carried out.  They were only intended to make an impression on the outer world and to appease the continually growing body of supporters of the reform party, especially numerous in South China.  The south remained, nevertheless, a focus of hostility to the Manchus.  After his failure in 1898, K’ang Yo-wei went to Europe, and no longer played any important political part.  His place was soon taken by a young Chinese physician who had been living abroad, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), who turned the reform party into a middle-class revolutionary party.

12 End of the dynasty

Meanwhile the dowager empress held her own.  General Yuean Shih-k’ai, who had played so dubious a part in 1898, was not impeccably loyal to her, and remained unreliable.  He was beyond challenge the strongest man in the country, for he possessed the only modern army; but he was still biding his time.