Return to the East
1918-1919
By late 1918, it was time to go home.
Han Liang had more than met the expectations of those who had conceived of his scholarship. He had earned three academic degrees. If not the equal to the old Chinese exam credentials, they were the closest approximation available at the time.
He possessed an education good enough for a US president. He had dined with a US Secretary of State. He had been the student of an advisor to China’s president and the protégé of a woman who could hold her own against America’s richest man. He had a network of Chinese contacts that included Sun Yat-sen’s son. Surely he was well placed to make his mark on China or at least to earn himself a handsome living.
Upon returning to China in 1918, according to his son Philip, Han Liang was supposed to have looked out from his ship at the coolies in sampans and wondered, “Can these be my people?” No doubt the reverse culture shock after seven years abroad was extreme. A ship from the US most likely returned him to Shanghai, but perhaps to Hong Kong.
We assume it could easily have taken half a year or more to get to know the great metropolis of Shanghai through which he had only transited in 1911, reacquaint himself with a China where men no longer wore queues, introduce himself to potential employers, and reunite with his mother in Amoy.
On November 11, 1918, China like much of the world celebrated the end of Europe’s Great War. Wherever he was on that date, whether still in the US or already back in China, Han Liang perhaps saw his return to China as coinciding nicely with a fresh start for his country.
In January 1919, when a Chinese delegation headed to peace talks held outside of Paris at Versailles, even the least politically engaged Chinese person must have had high expectations that the moment had arrived when decades of international wrongs to China would begin to be redressed. After all, China had been a staunch non-combatant ally, shipping over 140,000 laborers to work on European docks and farms, to transport munitions and even to dig trenches near the front lines. On Europe’s eastern front, a half million Chinese had worked for the Russian tsarist forces.
China’s delegation was led by experienced and French-speaking Foreign Minister Lou Tseng-Tsiang (陸徵祥 Lu Zhengxiang), while its chief spokesman was the polished Chinese Ambassador to the US, another Columbia PhD, Wellington Koo (顧維鈞 Gu Weijun). Ken Wang, Han Liang's Princeton roommate who had graduated 12th in his class at West Point, was an attaché to the delegation. The chance for Han Liang’s generation to shape China’s future was underway.
But China’s mood of optimism was quickly dashed. These distinguished Chinese representatives arrived at the Palace of Versailles to the ultimate humiliation: the discovery that their own government had not briefed them on a series of secret deals with Japan and between Japan and the West. In September, in lieu of payment for loans made to China, Tuan Ch’i-jui (段祺瑞 Duan Qirui) – Yuan Shikai’s protégé and successor as President – had given Japan various rights in Shantung Province. At the same time, the US and European powers had made a separate agreement that Japan could simply retain Shantung, Germany’s former territory in China. Widely admired by Han Liang and many Chinese and previously sympathetic to China's claims, Woodrow Wilson now compromised and did nothing to advance China’s international standing.
The peace talks carried on for months. By early May it was understood that the Chinese cause was lost. In outrage at their own rulers more than the foreign powers, thousands of students, male and female, from a dozen Peking universities marched. Their demonstrations grew violent, leading to arrests that only won support for them and their cause. Protests and strikes spread across the country, and Shanghai practically drew to a standstill. Laborers, merchants and chambers of commerce were all on the side of the students.
What became known as the "May 4th Movement" (五四運動 Wu Si Yundong) became a watershed in Chinese history. Still much referenced and invoked, it was a moment of broad popular awakening as significant as the Boston Tea Party to the American colonies, the fall of the Berlin Wall to Eastern Europe, or the Arab Spring to the Muslim world. “May 4th” now refers to both the immediate demonstrations that resulted in China refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles – the only participant not to do so – and also to the “New Culture” period of intellectual discourse and public debate that came before and after.
Han Liang's former Columbia schoolmate, Hu Shih, became one of the movement's most influential figures. He almost single-handedly democratized the Chinese language by choosing to write in "bai hua" (白話), plain, every-day language that more closely resembled speech, as opposed to the formal written style that Han Liang had once been schooled in. Hu Shih published extensively in the popular magazine known as "La Jeunesse" or "New Youth" (新青年 Xin Qing Nian). The magazine launched the soon idolized writer Lu Hsun (魯迅 Lu Xun). In two years' time, its principal editor, Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀), would go on to co-found China's Communist Party.
It was a heady moment when politics could not be ignored, but there is no reason to believe that Han Liang, whose chosen profession would rely on numbers, spared much thought for language and writing, as he sought to find his place in this changing society.
Han Liang had more than met the expectations of those who had conceived of his scholarship. He had earned three academic degrees. If not the equal to the old Chinese exam credentials, they were the closest approximation available at the time.
He possessed an education good enough for a US president. He had dined with a US Secretary of State. He had been the student of an advisor to China’s president and the protégé of a woman who could hold her own against America’s richest man. He had a network of Chinese contacts that included Sun Yat-sen’s son. Surely he was well placed to make his mark on China or at least to earn himself a handsome living.
Upon returning to China in 1918, according to his son Philip, Han Liang was supposed to have looked out from his ship at the coolies in sampans and wondered, “Can these be my people?” No doubt the reverse culture shock after seven years abroad was extreme. A ship from the US most likely returned him to Shanghai, but perhaps to Hong Kong.
We assume it could easily have taken half a year or more to get to know the great metropolis of Shanghai through which he had only transited in 1911, reacquaint himself with a China where men no longer wore queues, introduce himself to potential employers, and reunite with his mother in Amoy.
On November 11, 1918, China like much of the world celebrated the end of Europe’s Great War. Wherever he was on that date, whether still in the US or already back in China, Han Liang perhaps saw his return to China as coinciding nicely with a fresh start for his country.
In January 1919, when a Chinese delegation headed to peace talks held outside of Paris at Versailles, even the least politically engaged Chinese person must have had high expectations that the moment had arrived when decades of international wrongs to China would begin to be redressed. After all, China had been a staunch non-combatant ally, shipping over 140,000 laborers to work on European docks and farms, to transport munitions and even to dig trenches near the front lines. On Europe’s eastern front, a half million Chinese had worked for the Russian tsarist forces.
China’s delegation was led by experienced and French-speaking Foreign Minister Lou Tseng-Tsiang (陸徵祥 Lu Zhengxiang), while its chief spokesman was the polished Chinese Ambassador to the US, another Columbia PhD, Wellington Koo (顧維鈞 Gu Weijun). Ken Wang, Han Liang's Princeton roommate who had graduated 12th in his class at West Point, was an attaché to the delegation. The chance for Han Liang’s generation to shape China’s future was underway.
But China’s mood of optimism was quickly dashed. These distinguished Chinese representatives arrived at the Palace of Versailles to the ultimate humiliation: the discovery that their own government had not briefed them on a series of secret deals with Japan and between Japan and the West. In September, in lieu of payment for loans made to China, Tuan Ch’i-jui (段祺瑞 Duan Qirui) – Yuan Shikai’s protégé and successor as President – had given Japan various rights in Shantung Province. At the same time, the US and European powers had made a separate agreement that Japan could simply retain Shantung, Germany’s former territory in China. Widely admired by Han Liang and many Chinese and previously sympathetic to China's claims, Woodrow Wilson now compromised and did nothing to advance China’s international standing.
The peace talks carried on for months. By early May it was understood that the Chinese cause was lost. In outrage at their own rulers more than the foreign powers, thousands of students, male and female, from a dozen Peking universities marched. Their demonstrations grew violent, leading to arrests that only won support for them and their cause. Protests and strikes spread across the country, and Shanghai practically drew to a standstill. Laborers, merchants and chambers of commerce were all on the side of the students.
What became known as the "May 4th Movement" (五四運動 Wu Si Yundong) became a watershed in Chinese history. Still much referenced and invoked, it was a moment of broad popular awakening as significant as the Boston Tea Party to the American colonies, the fall of the Berlin Wall to Eastern Europe, or the Arab Spring to the Muslim world. “May 4th” now refers to both the immediate demonstrations that resulted in China refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles – the only participant not to do so – and also to the “New Culture” period of intellectual discourse and public debate that came before and after.
Han Liang's former Columbia schoolmate, Hu Shih, became one of the movement's most influential figures. He almost single-handedly democratized the Chinese language by choosing to write in "bai hua" (白話), plain, every-day language that more closely resembled speech, as opposed to the formal written style that Han Liang had once been schooled in. Hu Shih published extensively in the popular magazine known as "La Jeunesse" or "New Youth" (新青年 Xin Qing Nian). The magazine launched the soon idolized writer Lu Hsun (魯迅 Lu Xun). In two years' time, its principal editor, Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀), would go on to co-found China's Communist Party.
It was a heady moment when politics could not be ignored, but there is no reason to believe that Han Liang, whose chosen profession would rely on numbers, spared much thought for language and writing, as he sought to find his place in this changing society.
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Banner caption: Shanghai Bund's Hongkong Bank and Customs House buildings of the 1920s remain remarkably unchanged today (author's own photo, 2012)
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SOURCES
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World War I, Peace Conference & May 4th Movement:
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Hu Shih, his influence and his love life:
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