Chinese Revolution of 1911

Strands and Ideologies

Several ideas seem to have been important for late Qing liberal intellectuals, including social
contract theory, the organic state, sovereignty, and the territorialization of the state. These
ideas emerged in the context of social Darwinism and nationalism, and the interpretation of
historical development as a struggle of nations and nation-states. The liberal group
represented a new departure, elements of which began to challenge the foundations of the
traditional social and political order—the Confucian cosmological myth. The myth had been
made up of a fusion of family and political ethics and based on the cosmological belief that
sociopolitical ethics were embedded in the cosmic order. By contrast, the reform-oriented
Intellectuals emphasized the importance of Chinese citizens, as the basis of national destiny,
to the nation’s defense and well-being. Militarization and mobilization of citizens, they
believed, would empower China to stand up for its rights in the world. Together, these
notions represented a new conception of the state, but also a new conception of what it
meant to be Chinese. In the 1890s, the radical reformers shook the Confucian foundations of
the Qing empire and spearheaded an intellectual nationalist movement that was to culminate
in the May Fourth movement in 1919. This new focus on the nation and Chinese citizens,
together with the disintegration of the old cosmological and political vision, affected Chinese
intellectuals across all political camps. Time was running out for imperial rule by a Manchu
dynasty. Its existence was no longer assumed; on the contrary, it was increasingly seen as a
fundamental impediment to the power and wealth of the Chinese nation. A new age of
ideologies and political mobilization of the masses was about to begin.
Leading up to the Revolution of 1911, the reformers who favored a constitutional monarchy
and the revolutionaries who favored a republic engaged in debate, often vituperative. This
debate was philosophical and emotional, abstract and personal, and dominated by
communities of exiles facing dangerous and precarious conditions. Both groups can be
labeled “nationalist”: this does not get us very far, but it is important. Both groups tended
to favor a strong, modernizing state, though not the existing government; both envisioned
parliamentary democracy of some sort. Differences arose on the question of political forms,
but perhaps more importantly on how to define the “nation.” Did “Chinese” refer to Han
ethnicity or to a kind of civic participation? The revolutionaries emphasized that theirs was,
among other things, a “racial revolution” and they demanded “racial revenge” for the
ongoing crimes of the Manchus against the Han. For the revolutionaries, state-building
depended on nation-building. They also began to think about social justice, signs of an
embryonic concern for peasants and workers. The reformers tended to downplay ethnic
differences, citing the assimilation of the Manchus to Han ways. They thus defined nationality
in terms of the state and emphasized that true citizenship depended on education.
Finally, the two groups differed on means: the gradualism of reform versus the sharp break of
revolution.
The central question of the first decade of the twentieth century was revolution.
The so-called “constitutionalists” wanted the Qing to pursue reforms more
wholeheartedly and to turn China into a constitutional monarchy. Their main
concern was not the fate of the Qing royal house but the fate of China. They feared
the disruptions that revolution would inevitably bring hardships. Their models were
Britain, Germany, and especially Meiji Japan. The revolutionaries, by contrast,
wanted to overthrow the Qing entirely and create a republic. Their models were the
United States and France. Both sides had convincing arguments: the
constitutionalists warned that the chaos of revolution would encourage imperialists
to make further incursions into China, and that the Chinese people were not ready
for republicanism. The revolutionaries argued that the Qing was simply not
committed to reform and that the Manchus were irredeemably evil. The
constitutionalists envisioned a multi-ethnic state that would eventually be managed
by an elected parliament; the monarch would serve as a symbol of national unity.
The revolutionaries envisioned a Han Chinese state without hereditary privileges
and a functioning democracy; some revolutionaries were socialists.
Yet it is important to note what both groups shared: a faith in the
gradual development of democratic-constitutional procedures, a
sense of the Chinese nation as distinct from the dynasty, a
commitment to making this China wealthy and powerful, and a
belief in progress. Neither group really thought the common
people were ready for democracy; strong leadership and a strong
state were required. Constitutionalists and revolutionaries shared
another basic premise: that social Darwinism accurately described
a world where “the strong eat the weak.” Read optimistically,
social Darwinism in China constituted an early-twentieth-century
version of a “modernization” program.
Such theories, which spoke of the "survival of the fittest" and the need
for creative adaptation if species were to avoid extinction, seemed to
Chinese to have a melancholy relevance to their nation's plight. Yan Fu's
translations of such works into Chinese circulated widely. After his
return to China in 1879, Yan also worked as an academic administrator
in Li Hongzhang’s Beiyang naval academy, becoming superintendent in
1890. In addition to his many other duties, he embarked on a series of
translations of such influential works as Thomas Huxley's Evolution and
Ethics, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Montesquieu's Defense of the
Spirit of the Laws, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Although he
was often depressed and unsuccessful in his professional career at the
Beiyang academy—extreme depression led him to opium addiction—
Yan nevertheless managed to introduce an electrifying range of ideas to
China's students.
In the post-boxer atmosphere of hostility and fear, a vigorous force began to develop in China.
The many guises in which it appeared can be encompassed under the blanket term nationalism,
which for the Chinese comprised a new, urgent awareness of their relationship to foreign forces
and to the Manchus. It carried as well a corresponding sense of the Chinese people as a unit that
must be mobilized for its own survival. the publication of The Revolutionary Army by Zou Rong
in 1903, and the anti-American boycott of 1905The two exiled reformers, Sun Yat-sen and Kang
Youwei, both tried to exploit the disruption caused by the Boxer Uprising by launching their
own attacks against the Qing during 1900. Kang's took place in Hubei and Anhui in August and
Sun's in Huizhou, east of Canton, in October. Kang's goal was to restore Guangxu to power as a
constitutional monarch, whereas Sun wanted to found a Chinese republic. Neither plan was well
financed or well coordinated, and both were suppressed by Qing troops without difficulty..
“To sweep away the despotism of these thousands of
years, to cast off the servile nature bred in us over
these thousands of years, to exterminate the five
million and more hairy and horned Manchus, to
expunge the pain and anguish of our humiliation of
260 years, to cleanse the great land of China.… This
most exalted and incomparable aim is Revolution!
How imposing a thing is revolution! How magnificent
a thing is revolution!”
In the wake of the Boxer Uprising, a classically educated teacher of previously conservative
disposition, Wu Zhihui (1864–1953), announced his new principles: always support the people
against the monarchy, students against teachers, and the younger generation against the older
generation. Wu was neither arrested nor fired from his job but simply encouraged to pursue
further education in Japan. An even more telling incident occurred in 1903. The “Subao case” is
worth outlining because it entails one of the first nationwide instances of full-blown anti-Qing
feeling: not simple criticism of the government but the desire to replace the dynasty entirely.
A group of radicals including Zhang Binglin, Cai Yuanpei, and Wu Zhihui
(back from Tokyo) founded the Patriotic School and the Patriotic Girls’
School in Shanghai to appeal to nationalistic students. The schools
organized public meetings, discussions of Western political theory, and
student militia training. At this time, Russian troops originally involved in the
efforts to suppress the Boxers were refusing to leave Manchuria, and
students demanded that the Qing do more to defend the northeast. A
fourth, younger man, Zou Rong, came to study at the Patriotic School. These
men also wrote for the Subao daily newspaper, which openly called for
revolution in 1903. Zhang Binglin had also called the emperor a “little
clown” and used Subao to carry on a polemic against Kang Youwei’s
reformism. The Qing understandably wanted to execute such men, but the
radicals were, ironically enough, protected in the International Settlement
by British jurisprudence. The Qing tried to entice Wu and Cai outside the
Settlement by inviting them to address a meeting. That did not work, but
finally the British-dominated Municipal Council agreed that the Subao had
at the least committed lèse-majesté, and issued arrest warrants.
Zhang Binglin (who also wrote under the name of Zhang Taiyan) began to denounce
the Qing as a foreign, inherently oppressive dynasty. Zhang even cut off his queue,
symbol of submission to Qing rule. For a time, the distinction between reform and
revolution remain blurred, perhaps because reformers wished to restore Guangxu to
the throne at the expense of Cixi. And the Qing continued to proscribe
“constitutionalist” writings that advocated a constitutional monarchy as vigorously as
it proscribed revolutionary creeds. In August, Tang Caichang, a follower of Kang
Youwei, led an uprising in Guangxu’s name. Although this uprising was nipped in the
bud, it suggested that constitutionalists who sought to reform the monarchy and
revolutionaries who sought to overthrow it could still find some common ground. The
two groups also cooperated with Chinese merchants in 1904 to boycott American
goods in protest against the exclusion laws that prohibited Chinese immigration to the
United States. With most of the organization and funds coming from Overseas Chinese
supporters of Kang Youwei, the movement, brief as it was, foreshadowed the alliances
between radicals, students, and merchants of the 1920s.
The heart of the revolutionaries’ case lay in virulent anti-Manchuism. Zou Rong’s
Revolutionary Army began with the command “Kill, kill, kill.” Zhang Binglin and Liu
Shipei, both classical scholars, demonstrated that the Manchus were an alien and
barbarian group from time immemorial. But the “Han race” was descended from
conquering clans occupying China since ancient times. In the modern language of
nationhood and race, therefore, Manchu rule over China was inherently
illegitimate. As a hereditary military caste living in garrisons and separate urban
districts, Manchus represented daily injustice. According to the revolutionaries,
the Chinese were wretched today because their natural evolution into a strong
nation had been suppressed by the Manchus. As “slaves of slaves” the Chinese
had to throw off Manchu rule before they could stand up for themselves in the
world. Accounts of the trauma of the bloody Manchu conquest of the
seventeenth century aroused calls for ancestral revenge.
A modern sense of “racial” identity was thus grafted onto notions
of kinship and ancestry. Families had long used the principle of
descent to trace their ancestral origins back to a few mythical
culture-founders. To turn this into Han nationalism only took a
shift to the Yellow Emperor as the only ancestor, through his
twenty-five sons, of the various surname groups, all of whom
then became biologically related. The Yellow Emperor became
a kind of super-lineage founder and all living Chinese became
brothers or at least cousins.
The belief in anarcho-communism was predicated on the assumption that the age of
economic abundance was around the corner. In the years after the Subao incident and
from very different perspectives, Liu Shipei and Wu Zhihui agreed that the old order had to
be replaced with a stateless system based on natural justice. Liu thought that much in the
Chinese tradition was compatible with anarchism, such as Daoism and the “laissez-faire”
attitude toward government found in Confucianism, whereas Wu believed only in a
scientific future. But they both favored a revolution that would begin with the overthrow
of the Manchus and then go on to abolish the state apparatus entirely. The anti-Manchu
revolution thus would not result in a new government but in voluntary associations. The
Chinese people acting together would then throw off Western imperialism. Liu, indeed,
was the first Chinese to work out a theory of revolution in which the peasantry was to
play a major role. He foreshadowed the Communists’ later insights, teaching a simple
populist message: the oppressed will rise up. Liu also anticipated the Leninist thesis on
imperialism, positing that colonial struggles for independence would lead to such stress in
the home countries that the West would face domestic revolution, and he called on the
victims of Western imperialism to unite. Aside from such political tracts, a key expression of
the new revolutionary atmosphere came in the form of fiction.
Over the first decade of the twentieth century, constitutionalist and revolutionary organizations
took root among Chinese students and merchants living abroad, most In normal times, these
organizations would have remained marginal to events in China, but this was not a normal time.
Overseas communities were by no means divorced from China—all of the students and many of the
merchants had intimate business and family ties with the new national elites, and their writings
evaded censorship to circulate widely in China itself. The “brush-war” between constitutionalists
and revolutionaries was fierce, and sometimes involved shouting down and even attacking the
enemy’s meetings. Emotions ran high, especially on the revolutionary side. In the first decade of
the twentieth century a series of doomed uprisings, mostly reflecting Sun Yat-sen’s feckless faith
that a spark would start a prairie fire, resulted in the deaths of hundreds in the southeast. Several
students committed suicide to demonstrate the sincerity of their ideals and inspire comrades to
continue the struggle. Others engaged in assassinations.
Sun Yat-Sen from a poor rural family in the Canton area, had none of the advantages of education
and status held by the Kang family. Instead, like thousands of poor Chinese in the southeast, some
of the Suns had emigrated during the nineteenth century. Two had died in the California gold rush;
others had settled in Hawaii. There Sun Yat-sen joined an elder brother in the early 1880s and
received an education in the mission schools, which introduced him to ideas about democracy and
republican government as well as Christianity, before transferring to medical school in Hong
Kong. A cultural hybrid with great ambitions and a deep sense of alarm over China's impending
fate, Sun offered his services to Governor-General Li Hongzhang in 1894 as an adviser to help
with China's defense and development. Distracted by the crises in Korea and elsewhere, Li
ignored him. Sun was disappointed and frustrated. The British did not consider his training good
enough to allow him to practice medicine in their dominions, nor did the Chinese seem adequately
to admire his new skills. Sun's response was to form a secret society in Hawaii in late 1894 that he
named the Revive China Society, which pledged itself to the overthrow of the Manchus and to the
establishment of a new Chinese ruler or even a republican form of government. Raising some
money from his brother and other friends, he moved to Hong Kong and, in 1895, tried to combine
with local secret societies near Canton to stage a military uprising that would spread and over-
throw the dynasty. Badly organized, hampered by poor security and inadequate weapons and
funds, the plan was discovered by Qing authorities and the local ringleaders executed.
Sun fled from Hong Kong to Japan, and eventually to San Francisco and
London. In this last city he settled and began to read widely in Western
political and economic theory. His studies were interrupted in 1896, when
the staff of the Qing legation in London made a clumsy (but nearly
successful)
attempt to kidnap him and ship him back to China for trial and execution. Sun
became a famous figure when this dramatic story was widely written up in the
Western press. Returning to the East and setting up a series of bases in
Southeast Asia and Japan, Sun continued to labor, through the secret societies
and his own sworn brethren, to achieve a military coup against the Qing.
In 1905, in Tokyo, small and disparate revolutionary groups were brought together in
an umbrella organization, the National Alliance or Tongmenghui, under
Sun Yat-sen’s leadership. An activist and money-raiser more than an intellectual, Sun
was able to loosely unite revolutionary students around the principles of anti-
Manchuism (nationalism), republicanism, and the “equalization of land rights” or a
vaguely socialist sentiment. France and the United States stood as examples of the
patriotic energies engendered by republicanism, and revolutionaries tended to argue
that republicanism represented universal human values seen, at least in embryonic
form, in China as well as the West. They trusted that representative institutions would
strengthen China, not weaken it. Indeed, they argued that since all persons were
aware of the evils of the absolute monarchy, it would be easier to carry out a
republican revolution than to pursue constitutional reforms under a hopelessly
recalcitrant dynasty. They linked the idea of revolution (geming, an ancient term
referring to the change of dynasties) to restoration (guangfu): the recovering of China
by the Han people. The National Alliance’s support for land nationalization was not
designed to “free” peasants but to forestall future class conflict as well as provide the
basis for future state.
Sun Yat-sen found support among restless, adventurous Chinese who felt little allegiance to
the Qing and had tasted some of the opportunities and risks of life overseas. One such backer
was "Charlie" Soong, whose children were later to play significant roles in twentieth-century
Chinese politics. Charlie Soong grew up in a fishing and trading family on the southern
Chinese island of Hainan. Leaving Hainan to live with relatives in Java, Soong then shipped
to Boston in 1878, where he apprenticed himself to a Chinese merchant family. Bored by his
life there, Charlie Soong ran away to sea, enlisted as a crewman on a U.S. revenue-service
cutter, and was finally passed on by the ship's captain to generous friends in North Carolina
who put him through college and prepared him for life as a Christian missionary. Returning to
China in 1886, he worked briefly as a preacher but in circumstances he found humiliating and
badly paid. In 1892 he found a focus for his entrepreneurial energies and made a substantial
fortune by printing Bibles for the Western missionaries to disseminate. Before long he
branched out into the factory production of noodles, using advanced Western machinery, and
moved into a comfortable foreign-style house in the suburbs of Shanghai. At this point,
through shared secret-society contacts, he also began to funnel money to Sun Yat-sen's illegal
organization.
The most articulate of these revolutionaries turned out to be an eighteen-
year-old student named Zou Rong, whose work provides a second case
study of the new forms of nationalism. Zou Rong was one of a growing
number of young Chinese who, in the years after the Sino-Japanese War,
had gone to study in Japan; awed by Japan's power, these students sought to
observe it at the source. Zou grew dismayed at the apparent inability of the
Qing to react creatively in their time of crisis. Like certain secret society
and Taiping leaders before him, he singled out the Manchus for blame, but
unlike those earlier rebels he moved beyond slogans to draw up a lengthy
and careful indictment of the Manchus' weakness. Ironically, he was able to
do this because he had returned from Japan to live in the foreign-concession
area of Shanghai, where, according to complex jurisdictional agreements
concerning "extraterritoriality," residents were subject to the so-called
"mixed“ courts dominated by Western legal practices. Such residents could
write, and disseminate their writings, with a freedom impossible to those
living in ordinary towns supervised by the Qing magistrates and police.
Zou Rong drew his anti-Manchu ideas together in a short book entitled
The Revolutionary Army (1903). In ringing language, he called on his
Chinese countrymen to reject the Manchu yoke and seize their own destiny.
The Chinese had become a race of slaves, declared Zou, and such men as
Zeng Guofan, destroyer of the Taiping, far from being heroes, were the
lackeys of the Manchus and the butchers of their own countrymen. The
Chinese should learn from Western examples that it is possible to
overthrow domestic tyranny and free a country from foreign domination if
the people are conscious of their unity and struggle together.
These challenging calls, inserted in the midst of Zou Rong's
other demands for such reforms as elected assemblies,
equality of rights for women, and guarantees for freedom of
the press and assembly, made an exciting mix. The tract
spread widely, and Sun Yat-sen in particular seized on it as a
means to outflank the more cautious Kang Youwei,
distributing thousands of copies to his own supporters in San
Francisco and Singapore. Qing officials put powerful
pressures on the Western authorities in Shanghai to yield
up Zou and those writers and journalists who had
collaborated with him to publish and circulate his work. The
Westerners refused, and in 1904 Zou was tried in the
Shanghai Mixed Court on a charge of distributing
inflammatory writings. There he received a two-year
sentence, whereas a Qing court would swiftly have had him
executed. By a cruel irony, Zou, spared humiliating and
painful death at Qing hands, fell ill in prison and died in
early 1905. Even though he was only nineteen, he had
managed to make an extraordinary mark on his times.
Among the students in Japan were many young women, and this marked
a drastic change in Chinese social and political life. Although some
Chinese "revolutionaries" still brought their bound-footed concubines to
Japan, many independent young women were, with the encouragement of
their own parents or brothers, unbinding their feet and struggling to
obtain an adequate or even advanced education. They found moral and
social support in sisterhoods that promised lodging and economic help if
they remained unmarried, in groups of men who pledged to marry young
women with the still unfashionable "large feet," and in schools that
actively encouraged their pursuit of learning. These women now had new
role models in the guise of famous Western figures like Joan of Arc,
Mme. Roland, Florence Nightingale, and Catharine Beecher, whose
biographies were translated, printed, and reprinted in magazines.
Drawn to the orbit of Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary
Alliance, Qiu Jin liked to dress in men's clothes on
occasion and to experiment with explosives.
Returning to China in 1906, she became a radical
teacher in a small school in Zhejiang, keeping up her
contacts with members of the Revolutionary
Alliance and meeting members of local secret societies.
Often practicing military drills and riding her horse
astride, she inevitably drew criticism from more
conservative townsfolk, but she managed to retain her
position. It was at her school, in July 1907, in
attempted conjunction with a revolutionary friend in
Anhui, that she tried to launch an uprising against the
Qing. Local troops captured her with little trouble, and
after a brief trial she was executed. A short, unhappy,
futile life, some might have said; yet the example she
left was one of courage and initiative in the face of
deep national frustrations, and other Chinese women
were to press forward and take up the struggle for
political freedoms
The Participation of the gentry
The political culture of urban elites was transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century,
but the countryside was sinking further into stagnation. The gap between urban and rural China
would continue to grow throughout the twentieth century. Throughout the first decades of the
century the rumble of rural unrest never ceased, and peasants resisted new tax impositions
whenever they could. Such movements were local and less class-based than they were
community-based. Whole villages might band together to resist outside impositions or to struggle
with neighboring villages over scarce resources like water. Rioting peasants would seize
government buildings and grain storehouses. They often attacked the new schools and police
offices, which not only demanded new taxes but expropriated temples and land. They knew
nothing of democratic theory, though they possessed a strong sense of morality based on the
mutual obligations of kin and community. Peasants often belonged to religious sects and secret
societies. These were fraternal organizations, sometimes Mafia-like robbery and extortion rings,
but mostly dedicated to selfdefense. Such organizations could number their adherents in the tens
of thousands and sometimes were headed by men of considerable wealth and power. Officials
increasingly found themselves working with secret societies, the existence of which was obviously
not secret, though some of their rituals and practices were. And the lines between peasants
taking collective action, the formation of local militia, and the government’s regular soldiers were
often blurry. Many men divided their time among their family’s fields, soldiering, and banditry,
depending on the season and circumstances. Bands of beggars also roamed the land. Rural unrest
contributed to the revolution in mostly indirect ways, forcing elites to ask themselves
who would control the peasants if officialdom failed to do so.
In 1911, the attempt to conduct a new national census provoked an explosion of opposition.
Officials thought of the census as part of the new electoral system and the modernization of
China; peasants thought of it as a means of imposing new taxes. As long as provincial elites backed
the Qing, rural unrest delayed modernization plans but was politically irrelevant.

Conflicts between the court and gentry leaders, however, were rising. Take railroads: enormously
expensive and disruptive, requiring the government to borrow money and expropriate land,
offering the opportunity of profit for a few, and involving the most sensitive issues of national
sovereignty. Foreign investment in railway construction had become the norm, and gave
foreigners rights to mine natural resources along the tracks as well. “Railway rights recovery”
movements sought to gain control over the railroads for Chinese investors. But the court opposed
local railway projects, and its insistence on nationalizing private railway companies after 1900’s
seemed to many provincial elites to be a sell-out to foreign interests.
The plan for a line from Hankou to Chengdu in Sichuan
promised the exciting possibility of opening up the entire
southwest to development. Sichuanese backers were
enthusiastic, even though they themselves were divided
into competing groups and even though a good deal of
their money was lost to corruption and bad investments.
At any rate, they agreed on opposition to court efforts to
nationalize their companies—not least because the
government was planning to use a foreign loan to do so
—and street protests started. Student and merchant
strikes crippled Chengdu, and peasants and secret
societies attacked police and tax bureaus all through the
region. Local militia clashed with soldiers over the
following months, and revolutionaries became involved.
The scale of the violence was extreme in Sichuan
Local elites in China, especially those from the wealthier provinces along the Yangzi Valley, also
determined the outcome of the revolution. Once civil war broke out they abandoned the Qing for
local and provincial power. Perhaps they understood events in traditional terms: the Qing had lost
the mandate. But they also understood that “revolution” was an entirely new phenomenon and that
they could influence the creation of new political configurations. Although the Qing survived the
great midnineteenth- century rebellions – civil wars that left 20 to 30 million persons dead – the
government was never again able to fully reassert central control. Local leaders performed a number
of state functions, and a new kind of alliance between successful gentry and merchants began to
dominate in at least the richer provinces. Hence an exclusive focus on either a bourgeois or a gentry
class is misleading. The power of local elites rested on a combination of commercial wealth,
landholding, military power, and patronage, as well as the education and examination success of the
full-fledged gentry. This new kind of elite was considerably more urbanized than the traditional
gentry. During the civil wars of the 1850s, cities proved safer than the countryside. Elites began to
find more of their identity as managers of private and quasi-public organizations, such as guilds,
water control associations, famine relief organizations, schools, and the like. Above all, the urban
reformist elites were creating a public sphere: through discussions in places like teahouses and even
brothels and through the new journals and newspapers they could talk about the kind of China they
wanted to create.Urban elites began to untie themselves from the state.
Late Qing elites were not, then, revolutionaries, but they were shifting to a new kind of critical,
conditional loyalty. They pressed the dynasty with demands for limited local autonomy, for more rapid
progress toward a constitutional monarchy, and for resistance against imperialism. It was sometimes
their own children who were student revolutionaries, and ties such as friendship, local origin, and
common teachers often worked to unite local reformers, radical intellectuals, and even sympathetic
officials. Progressive Chinese of a variety of political dispositions shared common objectives,
assumptions, and worldviews. Politically, after the Qing turned to reforms in the wake of the Boxer
debacle, those very reforms created forces demanding further change. Elections for provincial
assemblies in 1908, for example, only increased demands for a constitution. It is worth noting that,
although 90 percent of the new assemblymen were gentry who had received a traditional Confucian
education, 30 percent of them had chosen to re-educate themselves in a more Western curriculum,
either in a Chinese new-style school or abroad.Such men were older and more traditional than the
revolutionaries, but they can no longer be called ignorant of the world.
This is not to say that the new elites were disinterestedly seeking the national good. The “railway rights
recovery” movement described above, for example, was designed to make money for its leaders.
Public moneys paid for the new schools, but their fees were too high for ordinary folk. But the point
here is simply that public institutions expanded faster than the Qing could control them. From a
mixture of motives, urban-based gentry demanded a degree of local autonomy within a constitutional
framework. If the Qing were unwilling or unable to provide this, the dynasty’s natural constituency
could turn against it.
The army joins the dance
In the years between 1905 and 1911, as the Qing edged toward
constitutional reform and tried to strengthen their control over the New
Army and the railways, dissent in China continued to grow. Having begun
to taste the excitement of new opportunities, assemblymen, overseas
students, women, merchants, urban workers, and troops in the New Army
all pushed both local authorities and the central government to respond
more forcefully to their calls for reform. The government's failure to meet
their varied demands provoked ever sharper criticism in which new
concepts of China as a nation— and of the socialism that might transform it
—began to emerge.
Eventually as a culmination of these tensions, the Wuchang Uprising broke out down
the Yangzi River in central China on October 1911 . Tensions in the area, reflecting the
disturbances upriver, had been running high. Student radicals, some but not most
affiliated with the National Alliance, had worked hard since at least 1900 to recruit
New Army soldiers to the revolutionary cause. Of 20,000 troops in the area, about a
third were members of various revolutionary organizations. Once a revolutionary
bomb-makers suffered an accidental explosion, and Qing officials began to make
arrests, seizing key membership lists. Surviving revolutionaries realized they could not
go underground: they had to resist, and the rebellion got under way the following
morning. The Manchu governor-general and the top military commander both fled,
and the rebels found themselves with a local victory. The rebels convinced a reluctant
colonel to lead them. This man, Li Yuanhong, had prestige among the troops, spoke
some English, and was familiar to the elites of central China. The Qing response was
to send in military reinforcements and to ask Yuan Shikai to return to official service.
Yuan, however, did not accept his new command until he had placed men loyal to him
in critical positions.
The first troops to take action were in the Wuchang Eighth Engineer Battalion, who
mutinied on the early morning of October 10 and seized the ammunition depot. They
were joined by transport and artillery units stationed outside the city. These troops
launched a successful attack on Wuchang's main forts, and by the day's end troops from
three other New Army regiments had come to their support. After trying in vain to muster
loyal troops to defend the governor-general's offices, both the governor-general (a
Manchu) and the Chinese divisional commander retreated fromthe city. On October 11,
members of the revolutionary societies launched a successful uprising in the third of the
tricities, Hanyang, across the Yangzi River from Wuchang, and, along with troops from
the First Battalion, seized the Hanyang arsenal and ironworks. The Hankou troops
mutinied on October 12. It now became imperative that some prestigious public figure
take over titular leadership of the mutinous Wuhan troops and guide the revolutionary
movement. Since there were no senior members of the Revolutionary Alliance in the
area, and no other local revolutionary society leaders considered suitable for the role, the
rebellious troops approached the president of the provincial assembly, who cautiously
declined. They then named the popular commander of one of the Hubei New Army
brigades, Li Yuanhong, as military governor.
Meanwhile, although the Wuchang revolutionaries were
bottled up, revolution broke out in other cities over the
last ten days of October: in the provinces of Shanxi,
Hunan, Jiangxi, and Yunnan. By the end of November,
central and southern China had in effect seceded from
the Qing empire, along with Shanxi and Shaanxi in the
north. Cities with major Qing garrisons were taken by the
revolutionaries, sometimes after fierce fighting and even
massacres of Manchus. Still, all-out civil war did not
occur. In some places that the Qing lost, the military took
control; in others urban elites worked with the military;
in a few places revolutionaries held power. But Qing
forces held in the north, and a stalemate ensued. In
December Yuan Shikai sent a representative to conduct
negotiations with the revolutionaries in Shanghai. It may
be that Yuan thought the Qing could be turned into a
genuine constitutional monarchy, with a new parliament
and himself as prime minister.
At the end of October, a senior northern general rebuffed the Qing order
that he lead his troops south by rail, instead joining with a number of
other field commanders and issuing a circular telegram of twelve
demands to the Qing court.
1. Establish a parliament within the year
2.to promulgate a constitution
3.Through that same parliament, to elect a premier and have him ratified
by the emperor,
4. to deny the emperor all rights of summary execution of criminals,
5.. to declare a general amnesty for all political offenders,
6.. to forbid members of the Manchu imperial clan from serving as
cabinet ministers,
7. have the parliament review all international treaties before they were
approved by the emperor.
Within a week the Qing court had complied with most of these demands.
On November 11, three days after the members of the Peking provisional
national assembly elected Yuan Shikai, a general of the New Model
Army, premier of China, the court issued adecree appointing him to the
same office and ordering him to form a cabinet. Yuan complied, naming
mostly his own partisans to key positions.
The Qing court's position was immeasurably weakened when Manchu and loyalist troops were
defeated in Nanjing in early December after several weeks of heavy fighting. Nanjing had been
China's capital in the fourteenth century, and since that time had always carried a symbolic
importance lacking in other cities. The mother of the five-year-old boy emperor Puyi now
moved to the front of negotiations, pushing through the resignation of the current Manchu
regent and authorizing Yuan Shikai to rule as premier while the emperor presided at audiences
and state functions. Sun Yat-sen returned to Shanghai by sea from France on Christmas Day,
1911. Four days later, the delegates from sixteen provincial assemblies, meeting in Nanjing,
showed their respect for Sun's leadership and the influence of the Revolutionary Alliance by
electing Sun "provisional president" of the Chinese republic. He assumed office in Nanjing on
January 1, 1912, inaugurating the existence of the new republic, which was henceforth to
follow the Western solar calendar with its seven-day weeks instead of the traditional Chinese
lunar one with its ten-day periods.
On that same New Year’s Day, Sun sent a telegram to Yuan Shikai that acknowledged how
weak his own military power base really was. In this telegram, Sun stated that even though he
had accepted the presidency for the time being,
"it is actually
waiting for you, and my offer will eventually be made clear to the world. I hope that you will
soon decide to accept this offer."
China now had both a republican president and a Manchu emperor, an impasse that required
some sort of resolution. The final blow to the Qing came at the end of January 1912, when
fortyfour senior commanders of the Beiyang army sent a telegram to the Peking cabinet
urging the formation of a republic in China. While the most intransigent Manchu princes
retreated to Manchuria, where they tried to coordinate a resistance, the emperor's mother
and her close advisers negotiated frantically with Yuan Shikai and the other Beiyang army
leaders for a settlement that would guarantee their lives and a measure of financial security.
When both Yuan and the senate of the provisional government in Nanjing agreed to
guarantee to the boy emperor and his family the right to continued residence in the
Forbidden City of Peking and ownership of its great imperial treasures, as well as a stipend
of $4 million a year and protection of all Manchu ancestral temples, the court announced the
abdication of the emperor Puyi on February 12, 1912. Refusing to recognize Sun Yat-sen's
claims, a brief accompanying edict gave to Yuan Shikai full powers "to organize a
provisional republican government"12 and to establish national unity with the
Revolutionary Alliance and the other anti-imperial forces in central and south China.
A massive civil war was avoided, although the southern capital of Nanjing
saw heavy fighting, and the Manchus in some towns were massacred or
turned into refugees. In February 1912, the Qing abdicated. Of China
proper, only three provinces close to Beijing (along with Manchuria and
the Western desert provinces) remained loyal to the Qing. Yuan Shikai
arranged the peace deal, negotiating with the Qing royal house on the one
hand and Sun Yat-sen on the other. The Qing abdicated in return for
guarantees of safety and a generous allowance, and a much-reduced court
continued to function into the 1920s, strictly inside the Forbidden City.
More critical were the negotiations between Yuan and the revolutionaries,
but with better-disciplined troops and foreign backing, Yuan held the
advantage. Sun turned the presidency over to Yuan in return for promises
that Yuan would move the capital to Nanjing, where the revolutionaries
were stronger, and establish constitutional government. In fact, Yuan was
to do neither.