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　　袁世凯(1859年—1916年)，字慰亭，号容庵，汉族，中国河南项城人，中国近代史上的政治家、军事家，北洋新军的首脑。早年在朝鲜驻军，击败日军。归国后在天津小站督练新军。清末期间推动近代化改革。辛亥革命期间逼清帝退位，以和平的方式推翻满清，统一，并成为中华民国临时大总统，后当选为中华民国首任大总统。中华民国的成立并没有给中国带来政治和社会的稳定，袁世凯后来效仿同一时期部分世界列强的政治体制，于1916年洪宪称帝，自立为皇帝，建立了君主立宪政体，但终归失败。

　　China's first president for life

　　中国位终身总统

　　Present at the miscreation

　　反常的表现

　　A HUNDRED years ago today, a young man stood surrounded by friends on a railway platform in Shanghai. Song Jiaoren was heading to Beijing to form a new government. He was to lead the largest electoral block in the new national Assembly.

　　一百年前的今天，在上海火车站的月台上，一个年轻人被朋友围着。宋教仁要去北京组建府。新国会里面的选举集团将归他领导。

　　Song never made it. Shortly before 11 o’clock on the night of March 20th 1913, an assassin slipped behind him and fired two shots at close range. Two days later Song, the man who would have become the first democratically elected premier of China, had died in a Shanghai hospital at the age of 30.

　　宋教仁没能完成这些使命。1913年3月20日接近晚上11点的时候，一个刺客窜到他后面，近距离朝他开了两枪。两天之后，宋教仁去世，这位即将成为中国位民选总理的男儿，死在上海医院，年仅三十岁。

　　All evidence pointed to a conspiracy orchestrated by Yuan Shikai (pictured), a powerful and ambitious general-turned-politician who was then president of the fledgling Chinese republic. Coincidentally, this week marks an important milestone in Yuan’s career as well. On March 26th 1916, three years (almost to the day) after Song succumbed to his wounds, Yuan was forced admit defeat for his own plan—which had been to subvert the republic and declare himself the emperor of a new dynasty.

　　所有的证据都表明这是一场由袁世凯策划的阴谋(如图)，此时民国初立，这个从将军转而来的强势政治家雄心勃勃，他当时担任大总统之职。巧合的是，这个星期也是袁世凯事业当中的一个重要里程碑。宋教仁受伤不治三年之后也就是1916年3月26日(日期几乎重合)，袁世凯被迫承认自己的计划失败 ——他企图改变共和政体，建立新王朝并登上皇帝的宝座。

　　For nearly 30 years Yuan had played the Forrest Gump of bad decisions in modern Chinese history. He began his career in the 1880s as the imperial resident in Seoul, representing the Qing dynasty’s imperial interests in Korea. It was a prestigious position which Yuan enjoyed immensely (of the nine official concubines he would take during his lifetime, three of them were Korean). But it went awry when his meddling in Korean court politics gave a pretext for Japan to extend its influence over the peninsula; this became the grounds for the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895.

　　在中国现代历史上，袁世凯做过一些错误决定，他扮演阿甘的一样角色近30年。他的事业起于19世纪80年代，当时他在汉城，代表清廷在朝鲜的利益。，袁世凯喜欢这个很有声望的职位(他共有九个小妾，三个是在朝鲜纳的)。他干涉朝鲜的宫廷政治，给日本在半岛扩大影响力提供了借口，为1894至 1895的中日战争埋下了祸根。

　　China’s embarrassing defeat in that war triggered a crisis of confidence among the nation’s intellectuals. In 1898 a cohort of young reformers gained influence in the court of the equally youthful Guangxu emperor. For 100 days that summer they put forward a startling series of policies meant to prepare China to enter the 20th century. When the reformers began to fear that the emperor’s aunt, the powerful Empress-Dowager Cixi, might try to depose the emperor, they approached Yuan Shikai, now a rising star in the Qing military establishment, to support a counter-coup against her. Yuan agreed to their terms. But then he wasted little time in making an overture to Cixi’s cronies, to see if they would offer him a better deal. Forewarned, Cixi came out of retirement and fulfilled the would-be reformers’ fears by forcing them into exile and placing their emperor under house arrest.

　　中国败得很尴尬，这在该国知识分子之间引发了在信任危机。1889年一群年轻的改革家影响了宫廷里面同样年轻的光绪皇帝。夏季的100多天里，他们颁布了一系列令人震惊的政策，要为中国进入20世纪做好准备。维新派担心光绪帝的伯母，有权势的慈禧太后可能罢黜皇帝，他们就接近作为清朝军事力量后起之的秀袁世凯，支持他发动反政变来对抗慈禧。他答应了维新派的条件。但他立即向慈禧的亲信示好，看与他们能否做一桩的买卖。事先得到警报的慈禧再次复出，维新派的担忧变成了现实，她流放了将维新派，并将皇帝软禁起来。

　　For his ersatz loyalty to Cixi, Yuan was named the governor of Shandong province, a region rife with restive groups of anti-foreign militia. Cixi ordered her officials to support these “Boxers” in their crusade, but Yuan wanted nothing to do with this violent rabble. Instead he began a campaign of suppression that forced many of them north, towards Tianjin and Beijing. By 1900 the Boxers had entered the capital and were carrying out attacks against foreigners and the Chinese whom they regarded as tainted by association.

　　因为对慈禧假惺惺的忠诚，袁世凯被任命为山东的巡抚，那里有排外的民兵组织。慈禧命令她的官员支持这些“拳民”的活动，但是袁世凯不想喝这类暴虐的乌合之众有任何瓜葛。相反，他开始镇压义和团，拳民被迫北上，来到天津和北京。1900年拳民进入首都，成群结队地攻击外国人和那些他们认为已经堕落的中国人。

　　All the same, Yuan’s career flourished. The death of his mentor, a great Qing official named Li Hongzhang, left Yuan in control of the largest and best-trained army in northern China. Over the next decade he consolidated his position as the empire’s most powerful and influential military leader. He dodged a bullet (perhaps an actual one) when the Guangxu emperor died young, beating the Empress-Dowager to the grave by a single day. One imagines that had the Guangxu emperor escaped house arrest and returned to power, Yuan’s treachery of 1898 would have been remembered. As it was, the regents of the new child-emperor, Puyi, feared Yuan’s growing clout and suggested that he retire—to rest his aching feet, they said.

　　和上次一样，袁世凯的事业发达了。他的导师大清官员李鸿章去世，中国北方规模训练的军队权就留给袁世凯控制了。他用此后的十多年时间巩固自己的位子，成为帝国最有权势和影响力的军事。光绪帝英年早逝，第二天慈禧归西，他逃过一劫(对他来说可能真是劫难)。有人认为如果光绪帝脱离软禁，重新掌权，1898年袁世凯的背叛行为会被清算。新任儿童皇帝溥仪的摄政王害怕袁世凯的影响力上升，就建议他退休——调养他的足疾。

　　Two years later, in 1911, revolutionaries took the city of Wuchang and plunged the empire into a state of open rebellion. The Qing court felt forced to turn to Yuan and beg him back to active duty to quell the revolution. At first Yuan demurred, telling the court that his feet still hurt, and bid his time. Though he managed to exact staggering concessions from the court, such as would have given him unprecedented control over the empire’s civil and military affairs, he could see that the empire was doomed. So Yuan asked the revolutionaries to give him their best offer.

　　两年之后也就是1911年，革命者占领武昌城并把帝国推进公开叛变的混乱状态。清廷认为必须起用袁世凯，求他担当平定革命的重任。起初袁世凯没有答应，他告诉朝廷自己脚伤未愈，并等待时机。尽管他使朝廷做出巨大让步，比如在内政和军事方面给了他空前的权力，他认为帝国的气数已经尽了。所以袁世凯要革命党把他们的职位让给他。

　　Sun Yat-sen was the leader of the new government and poised to become the first president of China. He offered Yuan the office in exchange for his support. So it was that on February 13th 1912, the day after the Qing dynasty officially ended, Yuan was sworn in as the president of the Republic of China. As part of his deal with Sun, he had agreed that elections for a national assembly would be carried out later that year. Placing his faith in the electoral process, Sun transformed his “Revolutionary Alliance” into a political party, the Kuomintang, and named his sometimes-protégé, sometimes-rival—Song Jiaoren—in charge of its electoral campaign.

　　孙中山是府的，即将成为中华民国的任大总统。为了换取袁世凯的支持，他将这个职务转让给了袁世凯。1912年2月13日，清朝正式结束后的天，袁世凯宣誓就任中华民国大总统。他同意来年举行国会选举，这是他和孙中山达成的一项交易。孙中山将自己的信念寄托在这次选举之中，他把 “同盟会”改组为国民党并且让宋教仁(他的门徒，也可以说是他的对手)来负责这次选战。

　　With the murder of Song, on that Shanghai platform, a last obstacle to Yuan’s bid for absolute power was cleared. Within a year Yuan was able to order that all members of Song’s Kuomintang be expelled from the national assembly. The following spring a new assembly, packed with delegates who would bend to Yuan’s will, approved a constitutional compact giving Yuan virtually unlimited powers.

　　宋教仁在上海的月台上遭到暗杀，袁世凯追求权力的最后一个障碍被清除了。不到一年，袁世凯可以下令驱逐国会里所有的国民党党员。次年春，新国会秉承袁世凯的意志，批准了一部宪法，授予袁世凯几乎不受限制的权力。

　　Even with those powers Yuan was not satisfied. In the summer of 1915 rumours began circulating that he might try declaring himself emperor. Frank Goodnow, an American political science professor and adviser to Yuan, suggested to him that the Chinese people were not yet ready for democracy; what China needed, he counselled, was a strong authoritarian leader. It might be easy in hindsight to mock Goodnow for his naive support of a ruthless dictator, but he was hardly alone. Lebbeus Willfley, who served as America’s attorney-general to the Philippines and as the judge of the American court in China, had told the New York Times that

　　有了这样的权力袁世凯还不满足。1915年夏开始有谣言说他可能自立为帝。袁世凯的顾问，美国政治学弗兰克·古德诺给他提议中国人民还没有为民主政治做好准备，中国需要一位强势的专制领导人。事后嘲笑古德诺天真地支持一个残忍的独裁者也许很容易，但不只他一个人这样做。美国驻菲律宾的司法部长，也是美国驻中国法庭的法官Lebbeus Willfley对纽约时报说：

　　anyone familiar with the situation can see at a glance that it would take a long time to develop the Chinese people to the point where they could put in operation a representative government according to Anglo-Saxon standards.

　　凡是熟悉情况的人一眼就能看出，中国人民要按照盎格鲁-撒克逊的标准搞代议制政府还需要很长一段时间。

　　Messrs Goodnow and Willfely would not be the last foreigners to argue that the “efficiency and stability” of autocratic rule bests such niceties such as “liberty and popular government”.

　　古德诺和Willfely不是最后认同专制统治的“效率和稳定”胜过“自由的民选政府”这类好词的外国人。

　　Whether the republic would have survived were it not for Song’s assassination and Yuan’s feverish grasping is a difficult question. The tumultuous events of 1913 have since become Exhibit A for the historians who argue that electoral democracy is somehow incompatible with the Chinese experience.

　　很难回答共和制的存活是否在于宋教仁遭到暗杀和袁世凯狂热的权欲。1913年的动荡事件自那时其就为历史学家争论中国的经验是否适合选举民主提供了重要证据。

　　This past week China’s current legislature, the National People’s Congress, inked up its rubber stamp to approve the next generation of Chinese leaders. It was a display of unanimity that would have made Yuan proud. The NPC voted to confirm Xi Jinping as the next president of China by a tally of 2,952 to 1. But even this leaves Yuan the opportunity to claim bragging rights. After all, someone voted against Xi Jinping. Whereas in 1915 a “representative assembly” hastily convened by Yuan’s partisans managed to vote unanimously, 1,993-to-none, to make Yuan Shikai the emperor.

　　上周,中国现在的立法机构人民代表大会为下一代中国领导人的任命盖上了橡皮图章。这场全体一致的演出会让袁世凯感到自豪。全国人大以2592比 1的记分选举习近平为下一届主席。然而即使这样也给了袁世凯炫耀自己的机会。毕竟还有人没有选习近平。然而在1915年袁世凯的党羽仓促召开的“国民大会”使投票全体一致，1993比0，让袁世凯当上了皇帝。

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