422762 CINXXX10.

1177/0920203X11422762GuoChina Information

Article china

INFORMATION
The ‘revolution’ of 1911
revisited:   A review of
contemporary studies in China China Information
25(3) 257­–274
© The Author(s) 2011
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Wang Guo DOI: 10.1177/0920203X11422762
cin.sagepub.com
Peking University, China

Abstract
Reviewing the last decade of Chinese-language scholarship on the 1911 Revolution, this article
suggests that we should view the Revolution in richer ways, rather than simply focusing on the
political event on 10 October 1911. By contextualizing the revolution in its world, this article argues
that it is necessary to view 1911 in its own terms and in global perspective in order to articulate
historical continuities and discontinuities beyond 1911. How did, does, and will the spirit of modern
revolution function and reshape the mental landscape in China’s past, present, and future? The
revolution is considered here to be not only a transhistorical source of transformation but also
part of the restructuring of social life and ideals. Revolution has become the ontological ground of
China’s modern society. The meaning of the spirit of revolution lay in providing the Chinese people
with a space of hope, where they could transcend current disappointment and discontent, and
pursue political, economic, and cultural visions to fundamentally change their world. For individuals,
revolution offered a means of meeting personal needs; for the nation, the revolution has meant the
unending pursuit of ‘standing up, enriching up, and strengthening up’.

Keywords
1911 Revolution, foreign presence in China, political revolution, socio-economic transformation,
spirit of revolution

One of the most common problems historians face is to read into historical figures and
events intentions other than what they professed, rendering history into a pack of tricks
played on the dead. This problem has appeared repeatedly in recent years in the field of
1911 studies. China’s most charismatic leaders in the 20th century – namely Sun Yat-sen,
Jiang Jieshi, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping – defined what they did as revolution
politically, militarily, socially, culturally, or economically. An urge to bid ‘farewell to
revolution’, and to reinterpret modern China in light of modernization discourse, has swept
over the Chinese intellectual landscape since the 1990s, inspired by an influential work

Corresponding author:
Wang Guo, Room 328, Building 32, Peking University, Haidian District, Beijing, China
Email: pkuwangguo@gmail.com

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258 China Information 25(3)

of that title,1 as well as in works of popular culture such as the 2003 TV series Road to
the Republic (走向共和). The same sense pervades the current explosion of commemora-
tive conferences, colloquia, papers, movies, and TV series on the occasion of the 100th
anniversary of the 1911 Revolution.
The paradigmatic shift from revolutionary historiography to modernization2 is informed
by a post-revolutionary conceptualization that reduces revolution to an incubator of politi-
cal, bloody, military terror. If we adopt a more comprehensive view of revolution, the
current negation of the revolution may also be interpreted not as a rupture with the revo-
lutionary tradition but as another phase in its unfolding, as was famously claimed by Deng
Xiaoping. Likewise, despite their anti-revolutionary bias, works that condemn 1911 for
being revolutionary, or question its revolutionariness, enable a broader understanding of
it as an event by widening the scope of enquiry beyond what was deemed acceptable in
an earlier revolutionary historiography. In this sense, the decrease in the number of mono-
graphs devoted to revolution may indicate ‘progress’ in the historiography of 1911.
I will limit myself in this article to four salient issues raised in Chinese-language studies
over the last decade:3 (1) the revolutionariness of the revolution; (2) the global perspective:
the 1911 Revolution and its worlds; (3) the end of empire?; and (4) the negation of nega-
tion: the spirit of revolution and its reincarnations. They are all part of one ‘mega-question’,
which, judging by mainstream historiography, has been the tacit subject of most enquiry:
how the spirit of modern revolution has shaped, and will shape, the mental landscape in
China’s past, present, and future. Like it or not, viewed in long-term and global perspec-
tives, revolution in one guise or another has served as the ontological ground of China’s
modern society – that which constitutes, determines, and causally controls social life by
offering hope and promising a better world.

1911 as revolution
Two questions have received particularly close attention in recent years: how did the
1911 Revolution happen, and what did it mean to Chinese people? I will discuss them
in that order.

The road to 1911

Recent revisionist scholarship tends to view the 1911 Revolution as an unpredictable
accident. Ma Yong, a historian at the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), has
asserted that it was the doing of Sun Yat-sen, who had been a devotee of violent revolution
since 1895. Rather than compromise with the Qing, Sun’s pursuit of revolution was
transformed in 1911 from a single man’s revolution to a national event.4 Similarly, for the
historian Zhang Ming, 1911 was an accidental revolution. As he puts it, ‘although the
revolution gave the Chinese the most advanced institutions, it did not bring immediate
changes to the country. It led not to wealth and power but chaos…. 1911 did not bring
change of customs, Westernization, new things, scattered modernization, or even institu-
tional revolution.’ Given that there was no revolution, all of the aforementioned would
have been achieved by Qing reforms. In his view, ‘the real gift of 1911 to the Chinese
was befuddlement by new institutions and anxiety over change’.5

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Wang 259

Such views ignore that revolution is never created from nothing. They have been chal-
lenged by analyses that insist on the importance of institutional upheavals and the spread
of revolutionary ideas in paving the way for 1911. The historian Luo Zhitian has offered
the most comprehensive refutation of the reduction of 1911 to an ephemeral event. Luo
has argued that rather than focus on the political event of 10 October 1911, it is necessary
to attend to ‘the great transformation representing the shift from the absolute monarchy
to democratic republicanism in its all-inclusive aspects, as an ongoing process. Although
the political transition in 1911 deserves attention as a symbolic turning point, it was part
of ongoing changes before and after.’6 Luo points to the diagnosis at the time of the reform
official Zhang Zhidong who had observed that ‘the ups and downs of the world situation,
and the blooming and withering of talents, owe superficially to politics, but essentially to
learning’.7 The collapse of the Qing court followed upon a decade of losing the dao (道,
the principle), losing the academic elite, and losing the regime, in that order. The three
‘losses’ overlapped, were intertwined and interfused, but they may be gathered around
three landmark events, which largely disturbed the equilibrium between state and society,
and between the Manchus, the literati, and fellow Chinese.

Losing the dao: The Boxer Rebellion in 1900.  The rebellion set in motion a fundamental degen-
eration signalling the twilight of the Qing. The Boxers undermined the hold of Confucian
orthodoxy which disparages heresies. It was the first time in Chinese history that the state
turned to ‘the heresy’ to meet a crisis, and the last time the government turned to traditional
resources of any kind for help. The desperate move, like a double-edged sword, brought
no happy ending. The Boxers ended up suffering from the court’s subsequent betrayal as
the regime and foreigners linked up to suppress them. For the Confucian literati, the fact
that the government turned to ‘heresy’ for survival indicated the court’s loss of faith in the
alliance between the court and the educated elite. The Qing, taking up a cultural position
against the whole Confucian system, lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the literati. After the
rebellion, a good number of literati were convinced that the Qing would be unable to solve
China’s crisis. The distrust rose to its peak after May 1911 with the establishment of a
Manchu Cabinet.8

Losing the literati: The abolition of the civil service examination in 1905.  The abolition of the
examination system was not merely an institutional change, but, in Yan Fu’s words, ‘the
hugest shake-up in thousands of years’. It accelerated the tempo of losing the dao. The
Four Books and Five Classics, as the main content of the examination, had provided
principles for ruling the country as vehicles of the Confucian dao. The repeal of this
system split the dao-based classics from the literati’s social mobility. The literati, as
agents of the promotion of the dao, lost their institutional base, which further hastened
their withdrawal from the political, social, and cultural realms.9 The repeal of the exami-
nation system quickened revolutionary changes. The virtual death of the literati brought
about the split of the long-standing unity between education and politics, cultural ortho-
doxy and the political centre, and official status and literati vocation. Consequently, the
traditional government-by-literati was replaced by government-by-gentry. The gentry
was less restrained by morality as it no longer owed its status to learning. The deteriora-
tion of moral restraint gave rise to local tyrants and evil gentries. Equally important, the

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260 China Information 25(3)

abolition of the examination system initiated the institutional, cultural, and material
divisions between the rural and the urban during the following century.

Losing the regime: The 1911 Revolution.  The Japanese military victory in the Russo-Japanese
War in 1905, attributed by many to Meiji institutional transformation modelled after
Western models, stimulated reformist thought in major centres of the non-Western world,
from Iran, Egypt, and Turkey to India, Vietnam, and China. It brought home to the Qing
court a realization that significant change required adjustment or even the abolition of
fundamental ruling principles and institutions. The result was the New Policies (新政)
actually initiated after 1907. A fatal weakness of the New Policy reforms was that they
coincided with loss of faith in the government.10 Structural reform required a shift from
the limited government of the empire to the expansive state of the nation-state, which
further presupposed expansion of the financial powers of the state.11 The Qing court hoped
to solve its financial problems by adopting Western methods. Its efforts to this end intensi-
fied political and personal conflicts between the central government and provincial gov-
ernors, as well as the government and the people. The reforms were, in hindsight, a major
trigger for the revolution in 1911.

What did the revolution signify–historically?

The reduction of revolution into a military and political phenomenon in such works as Li
Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s Farewell to Revolution (告别革命) and Ma Yong’s 1911: China’s
Great Revolution (1911中国大革命) deprives the revolution of its historicity, as well as
its broader historical significance. The meaning of revolution, no less than that of the
revolutionary event, is subject to change across time, space, and faction. The last decade
of the Qing witnessed the surge of a revolutionary wave that would flood the Chinese
intellectual landscape over the next century. Revolutionaries imagined revolution differ-
ently, and set their priorities accordingly. It is true that in general, reformist constitutionalists
promoted top-down, non-violent change, while revolutionaries advocated a violent revo-
lution. But within each grouping, there were enormous differences and inconsistencies –
between Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao on the Constitutionalist side, and among Sun
Yat-sen, Zhang Taiyan, Huang Xing, Wu Zhihui, and others among the revolutionaries.
They were different to be sure, but it is arguable in historical hindsight that their activities
conspired in unforeseen and unpredictable ways in the making of the 1911 Revolution.
In his 1904 classic On Revolutions in Chinese History (中国历史上革命之研究),
Liang Qichao pointed out that what differentiated the modern Chinese revolution from
the traditional dynastic transitions was its sources in a combination of British-style reform
with French-style revolution. The ‘revolution’ with its two faces, reform and revolution,
was a necessary phase in all nations’ evolution to the modern age, and permeated not only
politics but all aspects of society, such as religion, morality, learning, literature, custom,
industry, and so on and so forth.12 In a word, a modern revolution should be comprehen-
sive. It is a body with two faces: a bright face, pregnant with strong creative power to
bring about overall change, and a dark face, a monster capable of destroying everything.13
Both faces, as Fairbank pointed out, have been conspicuously visible in the political
passions unleashed in the 20th century.14

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Wang 261

Perhaps the most important consequence of the 1911 Revolution was to reorient an
inward-looking China to the world outside. Jiang Jieshi pointed out in 1912 that ‘at first
glance the 1911 Revolution was a response to the domestic situations, but the foreign pres-
ence really mattered’.15 While part of a long-term process, 1911 was an important milestone
in the abolition of the long-standing tianxia (天下, All-under-Heaven) order, and the turn
to recognition of a new world order dominated by other powers.16 The reorientation distin-
guishes 20th-century China from its imperial past. It would unfold in two parallel directions:
from tianxia to nation-state and tianxia to the world. The first inclination has been discussed
among non-Chinese scholars, most notably Joseph Levenson.17 The second has been rarely
noted. Cosmopolitanism, or in Fu Sinian’s vivid expression ‘jumping into the world’ (跳进
世界流去), necessitated institutional overhaul to accommodate a new world situation. To
some extent, the agenda of remaking China could be described as adjusting to the world.

In global perspective:  T
  he 1911 Revolution and its worlds
Recent works stress the importance of bringing the world back into the study of the 1911
Revolution. Wang Hui has pointed to the linkage between China’s revolutions in the 20th
century and the American and French revolutions.18 Similarly, Sang Bing has argued that
we need to rethink the 1911 Revolution by placing it within the context of East Asian and
world history.19 As if in response to such appeals, a number of studies have appeared
focusing on this issue, many of which are brought together in a three-volume collection,
The 1911 Revolution and 20th-century China (辛亥革命与20世纪的中国).20 In this section,
I will take up two approaches to this question in recent scholarship: the global flow of
revolutionaries and the foreign presence in China.

The flow of revolutionaries

The global circulation of revolutionaries and revolutionary thinking played a crucial part in
the making of the 1911 Revolution. As has been pointed out repeatedly by various scholars
outside of China, revolutionary thinking in the late Qing was largely Western in origins.21
Activity abroad was also integral to revolutionary activity within. The first proclamation
posted by the Wuhan military government on 11 October 1911 was drafted by Dongjing
Tongmenghui (The Revolutionary Alliance at Tokyo), and then sent by Li Cisheng from
Hankou to Wuchang that very morning.22 When the uprising broke out, Sun Yat-sen was in
the United States, while Jiang Jieshi was in Japan. When he heard about the uprising, Sun
did not return home right away, but travelled to Britain to mobilize British help.23 After the
‘failure’ of the revolution in 1913, almost all core leaders were to flee to Japan once again.
These motions were by no means unusual. From the late Qing and through the first half
of the 20th century, Chinese revolutionaries circulated between urban centres on the main-
land, such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, and the Communist Party’s base areas, and inter-
national revolutionary ‘hubs’, Paris, Tokyo, and Moscow. The Chinese revolutionary space
extended far beyond the boundaries of the nation. Unfortunately there is still little scholarly
examination of this space, and of the changing revolutionary networks that shaped it.24
Chinese overseas also provided significant nodes in these networks. Sun Yat-sen
was to remark at the time that ‘the overseas Chinese were the mother of revolution’. Wang

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262 China Information 25(3)

Gongwu has written that overseas-Chinese funding was crucial to the financing of both
revolution and reform activities. Constitutionalist literati such as Kang Youwei and Liang
Qichao appealed to the educated abroad, while revolutionaries such as Sun, with little
grounding in cultural orthodoxy but claims to Western-style education, found greater
receptivity among working people and secret societies. Overall, overseas Chinese in the
first half of the 20th century hoped for an independent and strong China, both as a source
of national pride and support in overcoming their difficulties as immigrants.25 In either
case, they would play an indispensable part in the revolution and its aftermath.

The foreign presence in China

However we may evaluate it otherwise, foreign presence brought the world into the interior
of Chinese politics and political thinking.26 ‘Foreign’ does not necessarily imply far away,
or even ‘outside’, nor can it be reduced to a homogeneous imperialism. The term covers
much more: political power and military force; imported institutions, ideas, and cultures;
and even conflicting interests among the ‘imperialists’. It is a zone of encounters and
negotiations between imperialism and the Chinese government, imperialism and revolu-
tionaries, and among imperialists themselves.
A comparison between Britain and Japan, the two most powerful foreign presences
during the 1911 Revolution, offers a helpful point of departure in revealing the complexi-
ties of this zone of encounters. As the most influential foreign power with the greatest
interests in China, Britain forced Yuan Shikai to negotiate with the revolutionaries in
December 1911, symbolically in the British concession in Shanghai rather than in the
battle frontier of Wuhan or the capital in Beijing. Out of its own interests, Britain did not
wish to see internal war destroy business activity, especially in the Yangzi Valley where
the revolution had taken place. As the German ambassador E. von Haxthausen pointed
out at the time, British policy was guided by economic interest.27 It was British loans that
saved the Yuan from the economic crisis, and helped the overthrow of the Qing.
Japanese involvement was multilayered and marked with unpredictability. Officially,
Japan sought to promote constitutional monarchy, courting Kang Youwei and campaigning
for him, while also making plans for military intervention. From mid-December 1911,
Japanese policy shifted to planning the independence of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria
in the North-East, and supporting the revolutionary government in the south in exchange
for recognition of its interests in the Yangzi Valley. These aims were to remain unfulfilled
thanks to the British opposition.28
There was also another, unofficial, side to Japanese involvement. More than 30 Japanese
activists took part in the battles of the revolution, and a good number of Japanese council-
lors served in the post-revolution government. With the acquiescence of Japan’s Ministry
of Internal Affairs, Japanese business groups secretly offered weapons to the revolutionar-
ies. Military officials in Japanese embassies in South China secretly supported the revo-
lutionaries. Ironically, Japanese ambitions were thwarted by other foreigners.29
Foreign presence was also important for the new central government, especially in the
financial sphere. The revolution had destroyed the mechanism for servicing China’s foreign
debt. It was the Customs Inspectorate, controlled by foreign powers, which stepped in as
guarantor of national credit at this moment, contributing to the effort for state building.30

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Wang 263

The involvement had contradictory consequences. Foreign aid may have enhanced the
power of certain political groups. Deemed ‘disloyal’ for that very reason, the activities of
these groups contributed further to the loss of the dao.31
Most important in the long run may have been the cultural encounter. Burke has pointed
to the importance of cultural encounters, and especially the rewriting of world history
from the perspective of the marginalized, in understanding modern revolutions.32 Such a
perspective, he writes,

makes it easier for the analyst to perceive implicit connections and analogies between the ideological
origins of the European and American revolutions and events such as the 1868 Meiji ‘restoration’
and the emergence of Indian, Chinese, and Egyptian nationalism or anti-colonialism,

as well as the revolutionary ideas of liberalism, socialism, and science.33

In a recent work comparing revolutions in Germany and China, Pan Kuang-che has
traced the trajectory of the American Declaration of Independence in Chinese thinking,
arguing that it provided revolutionaries not only with conceptual tools but also a practical
guide to revolution.34 The invention of the Three People’s Principles, and the insights it
borrowed from the Declaration, were just one corner of the Chinese scroll painted with
the Western pigments. Western ideas had been pouring into China since the late half of
the 19th century. The stream turned into a flood after 1895, as Chinese students swarmed
to Japan to acquire new learning.35 Culture wars proliferated as Chinese intellectuals
sought to balance foreign imports with local needs, as in disputes over National Essence
(国粹) and Westernization, revision of the national heritage, or the relative merits of
Chinese and Western civilizations.36 But the cultural space could no longer be identified
easily as Chinese or foreign: ‘the temporal present enabled them easily to transcend the
spatial dichotomy of the West and China; the spatial world, in turn, released them from
the ancient [Chinese] prison’.37
Contemporary intellectuals deliberately compared foreign revolutions and the Chinese
situation to choose the best way forward. For instance, when confronting the choice of
modes of governance, Zhang Shizhao and Liang Qichao both advocated an aristocratic
republicanism in order to avoid the ochlocracy that the French Revolution had unleashed.38
Pan Kuang-che writes that

with attention to the acceptance history of these revolutions, we should have more plural
understandings on how the intellectuals tasted the flavour of revolution through the revolutionary
discourses, moreover forged a political language for or against revolution, and hastened the
historical transition.39

Similarly, Russian revolutionaries such as V. I. Lenin were quick to place the 1911 Revolution
in global perspective, as an organic part of the process of world revolution. Lenin in 1914
regarded the Russian Revolution, the Persian Revolution, the Turkish Revolution, China’s
1911 Revolution, and the Balkan War as successive Eastern events, which together with
the rising revolutionary wave in Europe composed a worldwide reaction to world capital-
ism.40 More recently, scholars of revolution from Barrington Moore to Theda Skocpol have
stressed the importance of bringing the world back into studies of 1911.41

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264 China Information 25(3)

An additional comparative perspective may be brought here for its significance in under-
standing the changes surrounding 1911: the birth of the modern nation-states out of the
legacies of Eurasian empires. In the half century before 1911, with the expansion of capital-
ism, nation-states were to emerge out of empires in the whole arc from the Ottoman Empire
to Japan. China was no exception. Hu Shi wrote in 1912 that ‘there was no such concept of
nation-state a decade ago’.42 In other words, the concept of the nation-state in China was
formed in the decade before 1911. The emergence was part of a continental trend.
Charles Tilly has described the years 1830–1930 in Europe as the rebellious century,
‘with its many revolutions [that] wrought fundamental changes in the whole pattern of
violent protest in Europe’. The massive collective violence was triggered by transforma-
tions instigated by industrialization and urbanization.43 It seems to me that at the turn of
the last century empires across Eurasia simultaneously experienced common crises. While
the crises found different forms of expression, the common denominator in all cases was
the encounter with Euromodernity, and the challenges of capitalism and the nation-state.
The embrace of the nation-state was accompanied in all cases with a suspicion of capital-
ism that threatened autonomy.44 As Yang Tianshi points out, ‘the republican intellectuals’
who led the 1911 Revolution in various degrees shared a critical view of capitalism and
admiration for socialism.45

End of empire?
The 1911 Revolution represents a moment when the old world tipped over towards the
new. But China apparently was the only nation to preserve its territory during the transfor-
mation from empire to nation-state. In many ways, the republic was the offspring of changes
initiated in the late Qing. How did this happen? Some recent scholarship has attributed the
continuity to the unique Chinese concept of dao and its relationship to modern national
identity. I would like to pick up this view first, and then shift to social and economic con-
sequences of the revolution. These historical continuities behind discontinuities suggest
that China is still in the transformative process initiated in 1911.

Dao, empire, republic

It is widely recognized that constitutional government, parliamentary representation, party
politics, and so on, marked a new beginning in China’s politics. Some scholars, namely
historians Luo Zhitian, Ge Zhaoguang, and Lin Chih-hung,46 have nevertheless turned to
a republican version of a traditional political idea – dao overriding the state (道高于国) – to
explain continuities in Chinese identity as well as the persistence of revolution. As Ge
Zhaoguang puts it, ‘Chinese nation-state discourse should stress its cultural implication,
instead of just following European theory which focuses on political innovations’.47 In
the frontiers, it was the relict idea of the central empire, and its modern reinvention –
‘Chinese nation’ (中华民族) – which served as the glue that held republican China together.
To use a metaphor from Tocqueville, the revolution was not the beginning of a new history
but the flowering of the past.
Despite the abandonment of institutional vehicles, including the civil service examina-
tion system and the monarchy with its Confucius faith, the idea that the dao takes precedence

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Wang 265

over the state lived on. While Chinese intellectuals embraced nationalism to overcome
national humiliation, they continued to hold on to a belief in the possibility of a world of
Great Harmony (大同) beyond nationalism. This transcendental attitude was shared by
both the older generation – such as Zhang Jian, Liang Qichao, and Zhang Taiyan – and the
younger generation whose lives traversed 1911 – such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi. ‘In their
subconsciousness, there is the shadow of the late-Ming thinker Gu Yanwu’s struggle with
the choice between the death of the state, and the death of the tianxia.’48
The imaginary identification with the dao also functioned as a real force of history. For
the more conservative, it took the form of loyalty to the ancien régime, where China used
to be a harmonious union that permitted them to transcend a current divisive and weakened
China. Liang Ji, living under the republic, died for the Qing and also for the world. Zheng
Xiaoxu, to whom the republic could not represent China, would use Manchukuo as a base
to fulfil the King Way (王道) and the Great Harmony. Xie Jieshi, the first diplomatic
minister of Manchukuo, born and raised in Taiwan, educated in Japan, adopting Chinese,
then Japanese, and lastly Manchukuo nationalities, did not cease to identify with the Qing.49
For radical intellectuals, by contrast, insistence on tradition could legitimize denial of
contemporary authority, and cause for continued revolution. Intellectuals of the National
Essence group may be the foremost example.
The status of borderland regions, where the power of dao is relatively weaker, provides
a more illuminating perspective on continuities and discontinuities in the process of
nation-state building. As the historian Ge Zhaoguang has recently pointed out,

the conventional theory assuming strict difference between traditional empire and modern state
does not suit the Chinese case. Rather than a sharp shift from empire to nation-state, the Chinese
story was an intertwined narration, where the concept of borderless empire gave rise to the idea
of boundary state, and in turn, within the boundary state retained the imagination of borderless
empire. In China, the central kingdom gave birth to the modern nation-state, and the modern state
inherited the mentality of central empire.50

The imperial heritage is visible in Republican frontier governance in which legacies of

the past by far outweighed novelties of the present. In this sense, Republican state build-
ing on the frontiers was the successor to Qing empire building on the borders, aided by
new technologies of government.
More explicitly, the cultural vantage of central empire as the reification of the dao took
a modern form by the invention of a ‘Chinese nation’. Under the pressure of national crises,
inventors of the Chinese nation did their best to project on the frontiers the traditional
relationship between the Middle Kingdom and its borderlands, the so-called great harmoni-
ous relationship between the Han and minorities.51 However, due to the influence of modern
ideas of nation-state, and national self-determination, the process was far from a smooth
one. In 1911, it took two months for the revolutionaries to shift from ‘expelling the Manchus’
to advocating peace among the so-called Five Ethnicities. The previous non-Han peoples
living as vassal states or tribal societies in Qing borderlands were transformed into ethnic
minorities within the Chinese nation, and territorialization in the borderlands was supported
not only by traditional imperial institutional arrangements but also Western theories of race
and language.52 The contradictions of imperial and nationalist practice have driven the

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266 China Information 25(3)

process over the last century, and are yet to be resolved. But they are evidence of the ways
in which the past is alive in the present.

Political revolution and social economic transformations

As an urban political revolution, did the 1911 Revolution reach rural society or the overall
social realm? Supporters of the urban revolution thesis, such as Zhang Ming, argue that ‘the
coastal cities and the rural hinterlands respectively had a contrasting response to the revolu-
tion. City dwellers generally welcomed it, while in rural areas neither gentry nor peasants
had any interest in it…. Overall, 1911 did not touch rural areas. The only exception is the
police cutting off their queues…. For the people in the hinterland, there was no difference
between this revolution and earlier rebellions.’53 The revolution in this perspective had no
social and economic consequences outside of urban areas. Was this indeed the case?
As far as the post-1911 period is concerned, politics was revolutionized institutionally,
but the social revolution remained invisible. Qian Mu shrewdly pointed out that elsewhere
society revolutionized politics, but in China it was the other way around. Qian vividly
named it ‘the authority’s revolution’ (在朝革命). By the end of 1911, the Republican
government had already proclaimed a series of social reform regulations and laws abolish-
ing old official titles, banning foot-binding, opium, prostitution, slavery, gambling, and
superstitions, adopting the solar calendar and so on. Though the fulfilment of these regula-
tions did not proceed at the same rhythm in urban and rural areas, renovating customs was
in the eyes of the revolutionaries an indispensable measure to mould the new ‘national
soul’.54 Overall, cities were launched on a trajectory of vigorous change, while the coun-
tryside remained mired in the old ways. As a result, the revolution confirmed urban privilege,
and widened the educational, economic, social, and religious gap between urban and rural.55
The gap between the elite and the masses in revolution has remained a problem despite
subsequent revolutions. Zhu Ying has pointed out that the expensive new policies, and
enormous mass resistance to them in the last decade of the Qing, pushed the local elites
away from the court into identification with revolutionaries. Subsequently, both revolu-
tionaries and constitutionalists tended to rely on local elites to sustain order and carry out
social reforms.56 Over the years, rural society has undergone important changes through
institutions organized around province, industry, or class, in schooling and military con-
scription. In the economic realm, integration of the national market and urbanization that
are still at work57 have created a new commercial economy that provides more consumption
choices to ordinary Chinese.58 Moreover, the most important principle in Sun’s Three-
People’s Principles – equalizing land rights – has been carried out partially by the Kuomintang
and more thoroughly by the Communists. But efforts continue. Its most recent manifestation
is the ‘Chongqing model’.59

The negation of the negation: The spirit of revolution

and its incarnations
Since the early 20th century, China has gone through one revolution after another: the 1911
Revolution; the Second Revolution only a year and a half later; then the literature revolu-
tion and the new culture movement beginning in the middle of that decade, simultaneously

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Wang 267

with revolutions of morality, society, and religion; the National Great Revolution (the North
Expedition); the Anti-Japanese War; the Communist Revolution; socialist transformation
in the 1950s; the Cultural Revolution; and the Reform and Opening after 1978.
What is common to all these revolutions? It seems to me that they were all organized
around a dialectical conception of the relationship between state and society, and motivated
by commonly recognized urgent goals of achieving national independence, unification
around one state, enriching the people, and social equality. Since these goals were not
easily reconciled, revolutionaries have been divided over the best method to pursue them
as well as the priorities they established to that end. Successive revolutions then appear
as different attempts at achieving these goals through different methods, each phase lead-
ing to a restatement of priorities in response to earlier failures.
Even individual revolutionaries changed over time in their priorities. Take Sun Yat-sen,
for example. In 1911, he assigned priority to political and economic revolution. After he
was forced to resign the presidency, he announced his withdrawal from politics for 10 years
to pursue social construction. Following the assassination of Song Jiaoren in early 1913,
he stressed mental reconstruction above all, with economic and social construction in
second and third place, respectively. Then in the 1920s, with Soviet inspiration, he turned
to social revolution with political goals. Similar changes are visible in Communist policies,
stressing military struggle before 1949, turning to social transformation in the early years
of the People’s Republic, and ending up with the pursuit of economic change since 1978.
These revolutions were all driven by a faith in revolution to achieve total and fundamental
changes in all aspects of society, which is what I mean by the spirit of revolution. And the
faith has persisted. If the revolution failed to achieve what it set out to achieve, the disap-
pointment and frustration quickly gave way to hopes of doing it better and more thoroughly
next time around, leading to a new phase of the revolution. In Hegelian terms, revolution
appeared as a historical process of the negation of negation. The gap between what-the-
revolution-should-be and what-the-revolution-was has fuelled the engine of continuous
revolution.
The spirit of revolution in the last century has already been encoded into the Chinese
way of thinking and mentality by successive incarnations. Its concrete manifestations
have varied in means (violent or non-violent, or different combinations) and content
(constitutional, military, economic, or cultural), each enjoying hegemony over the others
in its immediate context. But each also has nourished revolution as an abstract idea: his-
torical revolution has nourished, and has been nourished by, a transhistorical spirit.
This twofold character of concrete and abstract revolution is crucial to understanding
the dynamics of Chinese politics since 1911. The former remains confined within the
bounds of the revolutionary social formation, whereas the latter points beyond it, the
interplay between the two ever-pushing revolution forward. In this view, revolution is
considered to be not only the transhistorical source of transformation but also that which
primarily structures social life. Revolution has become the ontological ground of China’s
modern society. Furthermore, the meaning of the spirit of revolution lies in providing
Chinese people with a space of hope, where they can transcend the current disappointment
and discontent, and choose political, economic, cultural, or social plans to fundamentally
change their world. For the individual, like Lu Xun’s Ah Q (鲁迅笔下的阿Q), revolution
means meeting personal needs, ‘to get whatever I want or whoever I like’.60 For the nation,

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268 China Information 25(3)

the revolution offers the promise of the unending pursuit of ‘standing up, enriching up,
and strengthening up’ (站起来、富起来、强起来). It all began in 1911.

Acknowledgement
I would like to gratefully acknowledge Arif Dirlik and Luo Zhitian for their original ideas and
comments on eralier drafts of this article.

Notes
  1. Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming: Huiwang ershi shiji Zhongguo (Farewell to revolution:
Looking back on 20th-century China), Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 1997.
  2. Arif Dirlik, Reversals, ironies, hegemonies: Notes on the contemporary historiography of
Modern China, Modern China 22(3), 1996: 243–84; Arif Dirlik, Modernity as history: Post-
revolutionary China, globalization and the question of modernity, Social History 27(1), 2002:
16–39; and Li Huaiyin, From revolution to modernization: The paradigmatic transition in
Chinese historiography in the reform era, History and Theory 49(3), 2010: 336–60.
  3. On the pre-2001 research, see Li Tieying, Kexue de tuijin xinhai gemingshi yanjiu: Wei jinian
xinhai geming jiushi zhounian er zuo (Pushing forward the 1911 Revolution studies scientifically:
For commemorating the 90th anniversary), Jindaishi yanjiu (Modern Chinese history studies),
no. 1, 2002: 1–13; Zhongguo shixuehui (Chinese historical association) (ed.), Xinhai geming yu
ershishiji de Zhongguo (The 1911 Revolution and China in the 20th century), Beijing: Zhongyang
wenxian chubanshe, 2002; Zhang Haipeng, 50 nianlai zhongguo dalu dui xinhai geming de jinian
yu pingjia (Commemorations and assessments of the 1911 Revolution in the Chinese mainland
over the past 50 years), Dangdai Zhongguoshi yanjiu (Contemporary China history studies), no. 6,
2001: 6–12; Yan Changhong and Ma Min, Ershi shiji de xinhai geming yanjiu (The 1911 Revolution
studies in the 20th century), Lishi yanjiu (Historical research), no. 3, 2000: 136–51.
  4. Ma Yong, 1911 nian Zhongguo dageming (1911: China’s great revolution), Beijing: Shehui
kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2011, 1–9.
  5. Zhang Ming, Xinhai: Yaohuangde Zhongguo (Xinhai: Faltering China), Guilin: Guangxi shifan
daxue chubanshe, 2011, especially 12, 15–16.
  6. Luo Zhitian, Biandong shidai de wenhua lüji (The cultural vestige of a changing age), Shanghai:
Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2010, 1–2.
  7. Zhang Zhidong, Quanxue pian xu (Prologue of propaganda for Confucian learning), in Wang
Shutong (ed.) Zhang wenxiangong quanji (Collected works of Zhang Zhidong), Taipei: Wenhai
chubanshe, 1980, 14434.
  8. Luo Zhitian’s talk, in Lu Jiande, Luo Zhitian, and Shen Weibing (eds), Shanyu yulai: Xinhai
geming qian de Zhongguo (Before the storm: China on the eve of the 1911 Revolution), Shanghai:
Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2011,1–2; Luo Zhitian, Liebian zhong de chuancheng (Inheritance
in fission), Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003, 1–32.
  9. Yu Yingshih, Shishuo keju zai Zhongguoshi shang de gongneng yu yiyi (On function and mean-
ing of the civil examination in Chinese history), Ershiyi shiji (21st century), no. 6, 2005: 4–18;
Luo Zhitian, Zuotiande yu shijiede: Cong wenhua dao renwu (Of yesterday and of the world:
From culture to figure), Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2007, 204–21.
10. Luo, Zuotiande yu shijiede, 217.
11. Ho Hon-wai, Qingji zhongyang yu gesheng caizheng guanxi de fansi (Reflection on late-Qing
centre–province fiscal relations), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin
of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica), 72(3), 2001: 597–698; Liu Zenghe,
Xifang yusuan zhidu yu Qingji caizheng gaizhi (The influence of the Western budgetary system
on the financial system of the late-Qing dynasty), Lishi yanjiu (Historical research), no. 2, 2009:

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Wang 269

82–105; Liu Zenghe, Qiangong houju: Qingji dufu yu susuan zhidu (From obedience to resist-
ance: Qing dynasty governors and the budget system), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo
jikan (Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica), no. 66, 2009: 55–98.
12. Liang Qichao, Shi ge (Interpreting revolution) (1903), Yinbingshi heji wenji (Collected works
of Liang Qichao), no. 9, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989, rev. ed., 42.
13. Luo Zhitian, Jindai dushuren de sixiang shijie yu zhixue quxiang (Thinking world and learning
trend of literati in modern China), Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2009, 120.
14. John K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800–1985, New York: Harper & Row, 1987,
41–2.
15. Jiang Jieshi, Junsheng zazhi fakanci (Address to the Journal of Military Voice), 1 November 1912,
in Qin Xiaoyi (ed.) Xianzongtong jianggong sixiang yanlunji (Collection of thoughts and speeches
of ex-President Jiang Jieshi), vol. 35, Taipei: Zhongyang wenwu gongyingshe, 1984, 2.
16. See Luo, Jindai dushuren, 52–4.
17. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 1, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1968, 103.
18. Shixuejie reyi xinhai geming yanjiu xinshijiao (Historians cause heat to discuss the new perspec-
tives on the 1911 Revolution), Zhonghua dushu bao (Reading in China), 16 February 2011, 1.
19. Sang Bing, Xinhai geming yanjiu de zhengtixing wenti (Integrity issues on 1911 Revolution
studies), Shehui kexue (Social sciences), no. 2, 2011, 146–8.
20. Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.), Xinhai geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo.
21. A Ge Lalin, Xinhai geming yu Eluosi yulun (The 1911 Revolution and the Russian voice), in
Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.) Xinhai geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo, 2012.
22. Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, Xinhai geming yu 20 shiji Zhongguo de minzu guojia (The 1911
Revolution and China’s nation-state in the 20th century), in Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.), Xinhai
geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo, 951–2.
23. Huang Zijin, Xinhai geming chuqi de Riben duihua zhengce (Japanese policies to the 1911
Revolution), in Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.) Xinhai geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo, 2104–5.
24. See Arif Dirlik, Socialism in China: A historical overview, in Kam Louie (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 155–72;
Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionary Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and
Chekiang, 1902–1911, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971; Rebecca Karl, Staging
the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002.
25. Wang Gongwu, ‘Dangguo minzhu’ yu sandai haiwai huaqiao de jin yu tui (‘Party-state democ-
racy’ and the ups and downs of the overseas Chinese), Zhongyan yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo
jikan (Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica), no. 67, 2010: 1–15.
26. Luo Zhitian, Diguozhuyi zai Zhongguo: Wenhua shiye xia tiaoyue tixi de yanjin (The foreign
presence in China: The evolvement of the treaty system in cultural perspective), Zhongguo
shehui kexue (Social sciences in China), no. 5, 2004: 192–204.
27. Yang Tianshi, Zaihua jingji liyi yu xinhai geming shiqi yingguo de duihua zhengce (Economic
interests and British policies concerning China during the 1911 Revolution), in Zhongguo
shixuehui (ed.) Xinhai geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo, 1960–80.
28. Huang Zijin, Xinhai geming chuqi, 2099–116.
29. Zhao Jun, Xinhai geming shiqi riben de duihua minjian waijiao (Japan’s folk diplomacy towards
China during the 1911 Revolution), in Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.) Xinhai geming yu ershishiji
de Zhongguo, 2117–44.
30. Gangben Longsi [Okamoto Takashi], Xinhai geming yu haiguan (The 1911 Revolution and
customs), in Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.) Xinhai geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo, 1981–99.

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270 China Information 25(3)

31. Luo Zhitian, Luanshi qianliu: Minzu zhuyi yu minguo zhengzhi (Deep water in chaotic times:
Nationalism and politics in Republican China), Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001,
169–75.
32. Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History?, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008, 130–43.
33. Christopher Alan Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Malden, MA : Blackwell,
2004, 284–324, quotation from p. 288.
34. Pan Kuang-che, Meiguo Duli Xuanyan zai wan Qing Zhongguo (The American Declaration of
Independence in late-Qing China), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin
of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica), no. 57, 2007: 1–55.
35. Wang Fansen, Zhongguo jindai sixiang yu xueshu de puxi (The genealogy of thought and aca-
demia in modern China), Changchun: Jilin chuban jituan youxian zeren gongsi, 2011, 183–5.
36. Luo Zhitian, Guojia yu xueshu: Qingji minchu guanyu ‘guoxue’ de sixiang lunzheng (State and
academia: The dispute about ‘guoxue’ in the late Qing and the early republic), Beijing: Shenghuo
dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2003.
37. Luo, Jindai dushuren, 101.
38. Zou Xiaozhan, Zhang Shizhao Jiayin shiqi ziyou zhuyi zhengzhi sixiang pingxi (Comment on
Zhang Shizhao’s political liberalism during the period of Jia Yin Monthly), Jindaishi yanjiu
(Modern Chinese historical studies), no. 1, 2000: 99–101.
39. Pan, Meiguo Duli Xuanyan, 48.
40. A Ge Lalin, Xinhai geming yu Eluosi yulun, 2007–25.
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42. Hu Shi, Diary, 25 October 1912, see Luo Zhitian, Ershi shiji de Zhongguo sixiang yu xueshu
lueying (A glimpse at China’s thinking and learning of the 20th century), Guangzhou: Guangdong
jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001, 90.
43. Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century 1830–1930, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, 3.
44. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of
Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 331–412.
45. Yang Tianshi, Cong dizhi dao gonghe (From monarchy to republic), Beijing: Sheke wenxian
chubanshe, 2002, 66–7.
46. Luo, Luanshi qianliu and Jindai dushuren, 142–60; Ge Zhaoguang, Zhai zi Zhongguo: Chongjian
guanyu ‘Zhongguo’ de lishi lunshu (Defending China: Reconstructing the historical discourse
about ‘China’), Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011, 3–38; Lin Chih-hung, Wangdao letu: Qing
yimin de qinghuai dizhi he canyu ‘Manzhou Guo’ (Dreamland of the kingly way: Emotional
resistance and the participation of Qing loyalists in Manchukuo), Xin shixue (New history)
18(3), 2007: 45–101.
47. Ge, Zhai zi Zhongguo, 36.
48. Luo, Luanshi qianliu, 19–59, quotation from p. 38.
49. Luo, Luanshi qianliu, 142–60; Lin Chih-hung, Wangdao letu, 45–101; Hsu Hsueh-chi, Shi
Qinwang haishi pan’guo: ‘Manzhou Guo’ waijiaobu zongzhang Xie Jieshi de yisheng jiqi rent-
ing (Loyalty or treachery: The life of Foreign Minister Hsieh Chieh-shih of Manchukuo),
Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History,
Academia Sinica), no. 57, 2007: 57–117.
50. Ge, Zhai zi Zhongguo, 28–9.
51. Huang Xingtao, Xiandai ‘Zhonghua minzu’ guannian xingcheng de lishi kaocha (Historical
examination on the modern ‘Chinese nation’ before and after the 1911 Revolution), in Liu
Fengyun and Liu Wenpeng (eds) Qingchao de guojia rentong (Qing’s national identity), Beijing:
Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 2010, 267–93.

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Wang 271

52. Ming-ke Wang, Guozu bianyuan, bianjie yu bianqian: Liangge jindai Zhongguo bianjiang minzu
kaocha de lizi (Borderlands, boundaries and changes of the nation: With the cases of two inves-
tigations of nationalities in Chinese frontier regions), Xin shixue (New history) 21(3), 2010:
1–54.
53. Zhang Ming, Xinhai, 138, 152, 191.
54. Yan Changhong, Xinhai geming yu ershi shiji Zhongguo shehui (The 1911 Revolution and
Chinese society in the 20th century), Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2008, 225–40.
55. Zhu Ying (ed.), Xinhai geming yu Zhongguo shehui bianqian (The 1911 Revolution and the
transformation of Chinese society), Wuhan: Huazhong keji daxue chubanshe, 2001, 543, 586,
613, 617, 644–58, 688, 692.
56. Ibid., 662, 666.
57. Man-houng Lin, Riben zhimindi shiqi Taiwan yu Xianggang jingji guanxi de bianhua: Yazhou
yu shijie guanxi tiaodong zhong zhiyi fazhan (The change in economic relations between
Japanese colonial Taiwan and Hong Kong: A chapter in the structural change in the relationship
between Asia and the world), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the
Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica), no. 36, 2001, 45–115.
58. Dai Angang and Yang Liqiang, Xinhai geming hou de Shanghai nongcun (Shanghai countryside
after the 1911 Revolution), in Zhongguo shixuehui (ed.) Xinhai geming yu ershishiji de Zhongguo,
193–4.
59. Cui Zhiyuan, Chongqing ‘shida minsheng gongcheng’ de zhengzhi jingjixue (The political
economy of Chongqing’s 10 projects for the people’s livelihood), Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao
xuebao (Journal of the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC), 14(5), 2010: 5–10.
60. Lu Xun quanji (Works of Lu Xun), vol. 1, Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981, 513.

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