The Center Does Not Hold

There are many who place a great deal of blame on the Salisbury Cabinet for the deterioration of the situation in Canada. Naturally, most of this is laid at the feet of Henry Balfour and Joseph Chamberlin but, one must point out, that a great deal of this only holds true when placing the Canadian theater of war in a microcosm and ignoring the entire world war that was going on. By the spring of 1901 there was a great deal more to worry about and some of it made the Canadian situation look tame. It is true that the Salisbury government had known, for some time, and probably sooner than any other national government, that the war on international shipping was going to begin causing severe shortages of consumer goods. This did not just mean a lack of creature comforts either. Food was about to become a problem.

While food shortages often drum up images of long bread lines and people sitting around with ribs that seem to be bursting from their sides, these are usually the most dramatic examples and quite often the exceptions to the real problems created in food shortages. The simple fact is that such shortages effect different regions in different ways and the sum accumulation of problems often appear as other things entirely and, at least in the public mindset, they are not related to the actual problem. This was never more clear than in the case of Britain in 1901.

The fact is that the cabinet had taken steps to protect their populations, both at home and in the commonwealth, from the coming disaster. It can easily be argued that the measures that originated from the office of Joseph Chamberlin were some of the more successful. Many in Britain never realized that the problems they faced were directly a result of the break down in international shipping and the decreased quantity of food that was making it to ports in the British Isles. People were getting food for the entire war, which is usually the mark of a rich country, and Britain was that but, the quality and diversity of food declined and was very noticeable. It was, in fact, so noticeable that looking over newspapers of the period it is easy to see. Articles with recipes for dishes that were designed to make palatable meals out of table scraps were common. There were also any number of articles about people growing food in tiny plots behind their urban homes.

Oddly enough, the single largest government initiative to relieve the food shortages never showed up in the newspapers. The government had quietly been re-designating the use of land from industrial to agricultural. They did so through very quiet means, usually disguised as the initiative of local officials, and these plots were most often worked as community affairs. In some cases entire rural estates were converted to farm use and recently unemployed industrial workers were recruited to try a new profession. None of the above mentioned initiatives were going to solve the food problem but, they went a long way towards buying time for Great Britain.

Such measures were taken in most of the belligerent nations during the war and quite often sold as patriotic duty. The problem was that, like Great Britain, these measures could only be taken in territory that they controlled. While the British Empire might be the largest on Earth it was far from controlling the entire planet and area’s outside their dominion were largely left to their own devices, many of which were suffering from food shortages even before the war. They were the first to be hit with the problems created from the lack of international shipping and these problems could change the score board for the combatants. This was never more true than in China.

When someone thinks of famine it is often thought that this is due to an inability to grow enough food. In general, this has been true in the past. The human race, like any other species, has always grown or shrunk in direct proportion to the food supply. As a result, the population has almost always hovered around that line of having almost not enough to eat. The modern world has changed this equation dramatically and, it has been noted by many a sociologists, that our rapid growth in the twentieth century has had a great deal to do with the birth rate trying to catch up with a sudden explosion in our ability to produce food. Strangely enough, the population has never caught up and the surpluses continue. Despite this we still have famine.

Modern famines are never the result of a lack of food production. This was very true in the early twentieth century where the fault lie squarely with the transportation networks and the lack of political will to increase their size so that they could meet the rising need of food stuffs. There are those who put this squarely at the fault of those who pay for the building of ships, trains, and other means of transport. This is an unfair assumption since it is quite clear that all of these men were bending over backwards to do the very thing that others are accusing them of being too cheap to do. There is also the little fact that no one in the late 19^th or early 20^th century even understood that this was a problem. The science of studying macro scale economics, the base of which is food production and distribution, was in it’s infancy and yet to realize where the weaknesses actually were.

Modern agricultural processes had already been introduced, largely by the United States, beginning in the late 1880’s. By the start of the war, most industrialized nations, and a few who were not, had already taken up the American practices. The world shipping network had yet to catch up with the sudden explosion in agriculture and this left the area’s that were still skimming by, with older inefficient methods, at the mercy of chance. When the war began chipping away at the transportation network, it was too late for the people who were doing things the old way.

This was never more true than in China, where her extremely conservative leaders saw no need to change anything about their agriculture. At least here, they had some merit to their arguments in that China had been successfully feeding herself for thousands of years and doing a much better job of it than anyone else. This is where the clear cut case of a lack of transportation is most visible. China was still producing surplus food stocks in 1901 but, none of it was getting to where it should. China’s problems were largely political and the war was only making this worse.

While China had a unified government, in theory, under the Manchu Dynasty, that was in name only. For most of the 19^th century the country had been racked with political descent, rebellion, and foreign invasion. All of this served to fracture a weak regime and China’s territorial governors had more control over their areas than did Cixi, the Dowager Empress. When Cixi decided to fight it out with all of the foreign powers, most of the Chinese governors decided to let her do it alone. Even many of her core supporters, such as General Jung-Lo, sat by and watched her loose.

Once the Americans occupied Peking, any influence that Cixi had on her top officials was gone. Unfortunately for the Americans, the man they replaced her with, the Gangxu Emperor, had no more influence than did Cixi. Each governor went their own way and many, such as Zhang Zhidong were openly cooperating with American enemies, most notably, the British in Hong Kong. This meant that the internal borders of China suddenly became road blocks and food transportation began to dwindle. None of the Chinese leaders had taken any precautions to prevent a famine because, apparently, none of them even thought it a possibility.

When a few natural disasters combined with the war, there was out right starvation in many Chinese urban centers. The unrest that it caused did not stop at the borders of imperial provinces like the food stuffs that were rotting on the river docks. The result of this unrest manifested itself in a very Chinese kind of way. The host of urban legends, superstitions, and a collage of religious beliefs began to flood the local markets. This rich diversity of human superstition began to merge into a cohesive belief system that was all it’s own.

This new religion was paranoid, xenophobic, and exaggerated the very real problems that the average Chinese were facing. It not only incorporated the problems created by the war but, had a firm foundation in the prewar erosion of Chinese culture that was already moving at full steam prior to the conflict. It blamed everyone for these problems, except, usually, those who were most responsible and this new belief system demanded action.

The going fad in China, at the time, was the ‘secret society.’ This kind of organization, somewhat comparable to European groups like the Masons, looked exciting to many young, hungry, and unemployed Chinese males who otherwise felt powerless. Not only did these groups offer solutions but, they looked good doing it. You see, the average Chinaman found their rulers to be as distant from them as the European invaders and, so far, had seen nothing from the dynasty that would fix many of their problems. In fact, many of these secret societies were as anti Manchu as they were anti anyone else. Most of these groups also began to coalesce into a single organization and, oddly enough, it was not political, military, academic, or any other organ of society that is normally charged with the administration of civilization. When China’s leaders failed to take care of the problems, who did the Chinese people turn to? It was their entertainers and, in this case, a group called the Order of the Harmonious Fist.