Bland returned to China just once more in 1920 before his death, but the years after he left were those which saw him carve out a new career as a freelance writer and commentator, mainly on Chinese affairs. As well as a succession of commentaries,
Recent Events and Present Policies in China (1912);
China, Japan and Korea (1921), he published more light fiction.
Collaboration with Backhouse He became best known, however, as co-author, with
Sir Edmund Backhouse, of two best-selling accounts of recent Chinese history,
China under the Empress Dowager (1910) and
Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (1914). Backhouse, already widely known as a
Sinologist, supplied the source materials for the volumes, while Bland, who had some talent as a writer, fashioned them into readable manuscripts. These books were highly influential in shaping Western opinion about the Manchu
Qing dynasty and
Cixi, the late Empress Dowager. Unfortunately for Bland, Backhouse was a fantasist and forger, and attacks on the veracity of the key source used in
China under the Empress Dowager, the so-called 'Diary of His Excellency Ching-Shan', commenced even before it was published. To the end of his life Bland parried attacks on the books. British historian
Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1978 biography clearly laid out the lifelong pattern of fraud,
forgery and deceit that had mostly engaged Backhouse's energy.
Views on post-imperial China Bland's reputation has been further tarnished by his furious denunciation of China's nationalist revolution,
China: the Pity of it (1932). Its attacks on post-imperial China, on its new nationalist aspirations and politics have seen Bland roundly identified as the quintessential 'Old China Hand', and a reactionary, if not a racist; according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, however, in his biography of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Bland's opposition to Chinese nationalist movements was based upon his belief that these movements were essentially unrealistic westernised elites attempting to impose a corrupt version of a foreign style of government on a China that was unprepared for such radical change. Trevor-Roper maintains that Bland believed China would only restore its independence with a renewal of its own traditions and institutions in some form of monarchy supported by the peasantry, which Roper suggests ultimately became a reality in the form of
Mao Zedong's communist "Empire". Bland was equally critical of British policy and British diplomats, attacking the 'Foreign Office School of Thought' in his reportage, and making fun of diplomatic life and loves in Peking in his lighter fiction. Bland died on 23 June 1945 in Ipswich, Suffolk, England. His papers were later donated to the
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library,
University of Toronto through the intercession of J.L. Cranmer-Byng. ==Books==