The 1911 Revolution and the birth of the Republic

A collapsing dynasty and two alternatives

After defeat by Japan in 1895 and the Boxer catastrophe of 1900 the Qing launched the New Policies, creating modern armies, schools and provincial assemblies. The reforms were meant to save the dynasty but bred the forces that would destroy it: New Army officers, returned students and the gentry gathered in provincial assemblies each turned against the Manchu court for their own reasons. Source 1 · Source 2

Two alternatives competed. The constitutionalists of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao wanted a constitutional monarchy with the emperor retained; Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui demanded the expulsion of the Manchus and a republic. The Tongmenghui’s risings in the south between 1907 and 1911 all failed, but the martyrs of the Huanghuagang rising at Guangzhou in April 1911 spread the revolutionaries’ cause. Source 3 · Source 4

Railways and the New Army: one night at Wuchang

The immediate trigger was the railways. In May 1911 the court nationalised trunk lines that private capital had been building, financing them with foreign loans; Sichuan shareholders launched the Railway Protection Movement, which turned into armed clashes in September. Part of the Hubei New Army was sent to Sichuan to suppress it, thinning the garrison at Wuhan. Source 1 · Source 5

On 9 October a revolutionaries’ bomb exploded in the Russian concession at Hankou and their membership lists were seized; rather than wait for arrest, the revolutionary cells in the New Army rose on the night of the 10th. The viceroy fled, and the rebels, lacking a figure of standing, forced the brigade commander Li Yuanhong to become military governor. This improvised rising ended the dynasty because Qing control had already dissolved in the provinces. Source 5 · Source 2

A republic by compromise: from Sun to Yuan

The court recalled the dismissed Yuan Shikai and gave him the Beiyang Army. Having shown his military superiority by retaking Hankou and Hanyang, Yuan negotiated with the revolutionaries while pressing the court to abdicate. Sun Yat-sen, back from the United States, was inaugurated provisional president at Nanjing on 1 January 1912, but promised to hand the office to Yuan once the emperor stepped down. Source 6 · Source 4

On 12 February the Empress Dowager Longyu issued the abdication edict in the name of the six-year-old Xuantong Emperor. It endorsed a “constitutional republican polity” and charged Yuan Shikai with forming the provisional government, while the imperial house kept the Forbidden City and an annual subsidy of four million taels. The revolution ended Manchu rule but inherited the Qing state and army intact, with Yuan at their head. Source 7 · Source 1

Parliament and assassination: the Second Revolution of 1913

In August 1912 the Tongmenghui merged with other groups into the Kuomintang, which under Song Jiaoren won the elections at the end of the year by a landslide. Song intended a cabinet system that would curb the president. On 20 March 1913, on his way to Beijing, he was shot at Shanghai station; the investigation pointed to Yuan’s entourage. Source 8) · Source 9

Yuan raised a £25 million “Reorganisation Loan” from the powers without parliamentary approval and dismissed the Kuomintang military governors. In July seven southern provinces rose (the Second Revolution), but the Beiyang Army crushed them within two months. Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing fled to Japan; in November Yuan outlawed the Kuomintang and the next year suspended parliament. Source 8) · Source 6

The president who would be emperor

In 1915 Japan’s Twenty-One Demands forced the transfer of Germany’s rights in Shandong and special privileges in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and Yuan accepted most of them. The same year, citing the American adviser Goodnow’s opinion that monarchy suited China, he organised the Peace Planning Society and in December had a “national representatives’ assembly” acclaim him emperor, naming 1916 the first year of Hongxian. Source 6 · Source 10

The reaction was not what Yuan expected. On 25 December Cai E and Tang Jiyao raised the National Protection Army in Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi followed, and even the Beiyang generals were cool. Yuan cancelled the monarchy in March 1916, but demands for his resignation continued and he died of uraemia in June. His death cut the last thread that had held the Beiyang Army together. Source 6 · Source 2

The opening of the warlord era

After 1916 the Beijing government was China’s internationally recognised government, but real power lay with whoever held troops. Duan Qirui’s Anhui clique, the Zhili clique of Feng Guozhang and Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian clique took Beijing in turn, while independent warlords ruled Yunnan and Guangxi. After Zhang Xun’s farcical restoration of 1917 and the dissolution of parliament, Sun Yat-sen set up a Constitutional Protection government at Guangzhou, and two governments coexisted. Source 11 · Source 12

Warlord wars were financed by taxes, opium and foreign loans, and the countryside suffered requisition and plunder. The Zhili–Anhui War of 1920 and the Zhili–Fengtian Wars of 1922 and 1924 swept north China. The chaos taught the May Fourth generation that “the republic” as a name guaranteed nothing, and left Sun Yat-sen with the conclusion that revolution was impossible without an army and a mass party of his own. Source 13 · Source 14

Interpretations: revolution or change of dynasty?

How the 1911 revolution is read is bound up with later politics. The Kuomintang made it the beginning of the national revolution led by Sun Yat-sen; the Communists classed it as the unfinished “old democratic revolution”. Mao’s “On New Democracy” called it a bourgeois revolution that had failed to overthrow imperialism and feudalism, whose tasks a new stage led by the proletariat would inherit. Source 15 · Source 1

Lenin, in “Democracy and Narodism in China” (1912), compared Sun’s land programme to the Russian Narodniks and welcomed the awakening of Asia. Historians note that the revolution barely touched the social structure and if anything strengthened the local gentry, while insisting that the bare fact of “a China without an emperor” was itself an irreversible change. Source 1 · Source 4