CHAPTER 2
The Collapse of the Qing and the Republican Revolution
Has it occurred to you that men are our archenemy? … This situation is by no means confined to the ancient world and is just as prevalent in the modern world … nor is it a uniquely Chinese situation … There is no doubt that the Manchu court [of the Qing dynasty] should be overthrown, but I would like to point out that a Han sovereign or regime could be a disaster worse than the ones wrought by foreign rule.
—He-Yin Zhen, “On the Revenge of Women” (1907)1
Raise the Han, Raise the Han
Destroy the Manchu, Destroy the Manchu,
Destroy the thieving Manchu.
—Military anthem, October 19112
On February 1, 1912, the final abdication of the Qing was formalized at the Forbidden City in Beijing in a sad little tête-à-tête between the Empress Dowager Cixi and Yüan Shikai, the Qing’s former number one general, who had turned to uncertain revolutionary sympathies. (Already a traitor to the Qing, Yüan was soon enough to become a traitor to the republic, but that was history yet to be written.) A new government had already been proclaimed a month prior, on January 1, in Nanjing, where revolutionary leaders had gathered and had already begun to rule in the dynasty’s stead. The symbolism of the Gregorian calendrical timing of the proclamation was intentional: the dynastic time of the emperors was at an end, while the rural peasant time of lunar calendars was to be curtailed. A new China, a new nation among nations in solar time, was to prevail. Yet, historical time was also to begin anew: January 1912 was counted as year one of the republic. While no one stood on a rostrum in front of millions of cheering supporters—as was to happen in 1949 when Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China from Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tian’an men /
Starting from the October 10, 1911 uprising of military contingents in the city of Wuhan, the sequence of military and political events leading to the deposing of the dynasty proceeded relatively quickly, even if the revolution had been some five decades in the making. As various troops defected, thus leaving the Qing relatively undefended, Sun Yatsen, who at the time was in Denver, Colorado, raising funds for the revolutionary effort, heard of the events through media reports. He rushed back to China (first to New York, via the transcontinental railway built by imported Chinese labor, then by steamship to London, overland to France, and from there, by sea to Shanghai), where he was proclaimed the first president of the Republic of China (ROC). A Cantonese-born, American-educated (in the newly US-occupied Pacific territory of Hawaii) Western medicine doctor turned revolutionary agitator who resided in British colonial Hong Kong, Sun embodied a symbolic figure of modern Chineseness that appealed to ordinary as well as educated Chinese, both at the time and subsequently. While formally the provisional president for only a few months (ousted by the ever-traitorous Yüan Shikai), Sun remained in constant opposition to the constituted ROC government until his death in 1925. However, he was and remains heralded as “the father of the nation” (guofu /
The Republican Revolution (also called the 1911 Revolution, or the Xinhai [
The 1911 Revolution has been called, by Communist historiographical convention, a “bourgeois” revolution. In the idiom of Marxian party dogma—where socialist revolutions must be preceded by bourgeois ones—the overthrow of the Qing dynasty serves the historicist purpose. It would be a mistake to adhere rigidly to such claims, however. Fitting the leaders, the ideology, or the politics of the revolution into a categorical straitjacket not only misconstrues the subordinated relationship between China and the capitalist world but places China into a teleological trajectory formed by histories made else-where.4 There is no doubt that China’s Republican Revolution was in part led and informed by a new class in formation—a scholar-bureaucrat fraction transforming itself into an intelligentsia with connections to urban, rural, military and commercial elites—but it is not evident that that means this class must be called a “bourgeoisie,” or that the revolution is most appropriately understood as a class-based, bourgeois affair.5 In a different idiom, the Republican Revolution has been claimed as a “Han-ethnic” revolution, where the Manchu-ness of the Qing is emphasized and the anti-Manchu nature of the revolutionaries becomes a paramount attribute. There were certainly a large number of adherents to revolutionary politics and activity of the time who construed the revolution in such mono-ethnic national terms. Sun Yatsen, for one, led a Japan-based Chinese revolutionary organization, the Tongmeng Hui (Revolutionary Alliance /
It has also been claimed—with far better evidence from the outcomes—that the Republican Revolution merely replaced one patriarchal state form with another, and that in this, its class or ethnic character is entirely beside the point. Given how very quickly the new leaders turned to suppress their erstwhile female comrades, and given how very anti-feminist many leaders of the early ROC proved to be, the securing of a patriarchal state—even while it reluctantly opened certain social, professional, educational, and other opportunities to women—seems to have far more basis in fact than any of the other claims. He-Yin Zhen, the anarcho-feminist cited at the opening of this chapter, saw this likelihood very clearly. The manifest continuity of patriarchy, however, masks the different ways in which that power operated in the new era: now, often by making common cause with socially progressive forces, some of which were led by women, patriarchal prerogative could partially conceal itself behind mildly feminist-seeming rhetoric and practice (the anti-footbinding movement and support for women’s education are two such examples).
What also is quite clear is that the Republican Revolution of 1911 was one among many global nationalist revolutions of the first
