Chapter 88 Japanese consultant

In 1901, the Qing government of China began to send overseas students to Tokyo to study the control system of the Meiji era. Since then, the Japanese police model has spread throughout China.Knowing this, there is nothing surprising about the Japanese origin of the word police.After returning to China, many of these overseas students were used as police officers or instructors and assigned to military academies and police academies newly established by hardline provincial government officials like Yuan Shikai or reformers who were more directly loyal to the Qing Dynasty. One of the latter's leading institutions was the Beijing Police Training Unit, established by Prince Jing, the Manchu chief who was also the Zongli Yamen, with the help of Japanese police expert Kawashima Naniwa.Naniwa Kawashima's original contract was to direct police training for the new school, but he soon became general counsel in the Qing government's final restoration.In a memorandum submitted by Naniwa Kawashima in 1902, he proposed the basic outline of the police reorganization plan from 1905 to 1908.The memo itself spells out the principled underpinnings of the plan:

In addition to establishing what would become the symbol of Kuomintang political rule—the two wings protected by the army and the police—Kawashima's memorandum also called for the establishment of a national police system directly accountable to the emperor.As Naniwa Kawashima clearly points out, this new police system in China is modeled on the centralized police in Europe, especially similar to those in the Netherlands and Berlin. In order to obtain the wealth and power of Europe, the Qing government issued an order to establish a police officer training school in 1905 to implement Kawashima Naniwa's proposal. On October 8, 1905, under the auspices of Xu Shichang, a senior military minister of the Ministry of War, the Patrol Department was established; after the Green Battalion was abolished in 1907, the Patrol Department was merged into the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and all police work was under the jurisdiction of the Police Department. , 20 years later became the main administrative core of Dai Li's power in the Ministry of the Interior of the Kuomintang.

During the Revolution of 1907-1911, the Patrol Department became the model of Qing police force.After Yuan Shikai's death, the police in Beijing were also set up as a model for the whole country. At the "Police Conference" held by the Ministry of the Interior in Beijing in April 1917, the Patrol Department made a big splash. Seven months later, the Interior Ministry ordered the provinces to open police training schools.However, due to the fighting between various warlords, the central and local governments had no time to take care of the specific affairs of the police, and the reform efforts were interrupted.In this respect, the history of the early Republic of China repeated the history of the late Qing: while the Japanese model and the European example offered the possibility of centralization, it was difficult to implement police rule in China without first unifying the military.More effective and long-term police reforms will have to wait until the completion of the Northern Expedition and the establishment of a new government in Nanjing.