The 1911 Revolution and the birth of the Republic

A dynasty’s last reforms: the New Policies and constitutional preparation

Defeat by Japan in 1895 exposed the limits of three decades of Self-Strengthening, which had imported Western arms and technology without changing institutions. In 1898 the Guangxu Emperor turned to reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao and began the Hundred Days’ Reform, remaking education, the army and the economy on the Japanese model, but after about a hundred days the Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup, put the emperor under house arrest and reversed the reforms. Kang and Liang fled abroad to escape execution, and the Boxer attacks on foreigners that Cixi encouraged in 1900 ended with the occupation of Beijing by the eight-nation alliance and a punitive settlement in 1901. 1 2 3

After the defeat the court launched the New Policies from 1901. It abolished the civil service examinations, encouraged modern schools and study abroad, set up a military academy in every province and trained a modern New Army. The plan called for 500,000 regular troops within ten years, but only about 190,000 were properly trained by 1911. Because the Boxer indemnity exceeded the state’s annual revenue, the court widened tax collection and created police forces, prisons and new codes. The reforms were meant to save the dynasty, yet the students of the new schools, the New Army officers and the returned students from Japan became the very people who would bring it down. 4 1

Political reform turned into constitutional preparation. In 1905 five ministers went abroad to study foreign constitutions, and in September 1906 Cixi issued an edict announcing preparation for constitutional government. The Outline of the Imperial Constitution of August 1908, modelled on the Meiji Constitution, promised a constitution in nine years; provincial assembly elections followed in 1909 and the national Advisory Council opened in 1910. When the Guangxu Emperor and Cixi died a day apart in November 1908, the two-year-old Puyi took the throne as the Xuantong Emperor, with his father Zaifeng, Prince Chun, as regent. 4 5

The gentry and merchants gathered in the provincial assemblies had originally supported constitutional monarchy. They petitioned repeatedly for an early parliament, but the first cabinet the regent formed in May 1911 dashed their hopes. Of its thirteen members under Prime Minister Yikuang, Prince Qing, eight were Manchus, seven of them from the imperial clan, and only four were Han Chinese, so it was called the “royal cabinet”. This attempt to concentrate the reform in the hands of the Manchu house turned many constitutionalists against the court, and when the revolution came half a year later they led the declarations of independence in many provinces. 4 1 6

Constitutionalists and revolutionaries: the Tongmenghui and its failed risings

Two alternatives competed in the late Qing. The exiled Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao founded the Emperor Protection Society to restore the Guangxu Emperor and realise constitutional monarchy. Sun Yat-sen, by contrast, founded the Revive China Society in Honolulu in 1894 to overthrow the dynasty rather than reform it; when his first Guangzhou rising was exposed in 1895 he went into exile and raised funds in Japan, the United States, Canada and Britain. The overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia and North America were the main source of revolutionary money, and in their Southeast Asian newspapers constitutionalists and revolutionaries fought a fierce war of words over monarchy and republic. 1 7 8

In 1904 revolutionary groups appeared inside China as well: Huang Xing, Song Jiaoren and Chen Tianhua founded the Huaxinghui in Hunan, and Cai Yuanpei the Guangfuhui in Shanghai. On 20 August 1905 the Revive China Society, the Guangfuhui and other groups merged in Tokyo into the Tongmenghui, with Sun Yat-sen as its leader and Huang Xing second to him. Its programme read: “Expel the Tatar barbarians, revive Zhonghua, establish a republic, and distribute land equally among the people.” More than 90 per cent of its founding members were aged 17 to 26, and students in Japan such as Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Liao Zhongkai formed its core. 9 1 10

The revolutionaries made anti-Manchu nationalism their weapon. Zou Rong’s The Revolutionary Army called for the expulsion of the Manchus and Zhang Binglin preached “anti-Manchuism”. Seven Tongmenghui-led risings between December 1906 and April 1908 were all suppressed; in July 1907 Xu Xilin of the Guangfuhui assassinated the Anhui governor En Ming at Anqing and rose in revolt, and after his execution the woman revolutionary Qiu Jin, who ran the Datong School at Shaoxing with him, was arrested there and executed on 15 July. In 1910 Wang Jingwei was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment for trying to assassinate the regent Zaifeng. From 1908 the revolutionaries concentrated on spreading their organisation inside the New Army. 1 11 9 12

At the Penang conference of November 1910 Sun and the Tongmenghui leadership decided on a decisive battle at Guangzhou and raised funds among the Chinese of the Malay Peninsula. On 27 April 1911 about a hundred men led by Huang Xing stormed the residence of the Viceroy of Liangguang, but the viceroy escaped over a wall and Qing reinforcements nearly annihilated the attackers; Huang lost two fingers. Of the 86 bodies recovered, the 72 who could be identified were honoured as the “72 martyrs of Huanghuagang”, and the letter Lin Juemin left his wife on the eve of battle spread the revolutionaries’ cause. It was the last failure before the Wuchang Uprising. 13 10 9

Railways and the New Army: the Railway Protection Movement and one night at Wuchang

The immediate trigger was the railways. In 1905 Sichuan set up the Sichuan–Hankou Railway Company to build 1,238 km of line from Chengdu to Wuhan, selling shares to the public and levying a special 3 per cent tax on landowners’ harvests in exchange for share certificates. Of the roughly 11.98 million taels raised by 1911, 77.5 per cent came from that tax, so much of the Sichuan gentry and merchant class were shareholders, yet corruption and squabbling meant almost no track had been laid. Pressed by the Boxer indemnity, the court under the Minister of Posts and Communications Sheng Xuanhuai nationalised all locally controlled trunk lines on 9 May and on 20 May signed a £10 million loan with a British, German, French and American banking consortium, pledging the operating rights of the lines. 14 1

Sichuan’s shareholders were enraged to be compensated in government bonds rather than silver, and at a far lower rate than other provinces. On 17 June Pu Dianjun and other members of the provincial assembly formed the Railway Protection League, and in August more than 10,000 people rallied in Chengdu amid student and merchant strikes. When the shareholders resolved on 1 September to withhold the grain tax, the governor-general Zhao Erfeng arrested the leaders on 7 September and opened fire on the crowd demanding their release, killing 32 in Chengdu alone. After this Bloody Chengdu Incident, Comrades’ Armies led by the Tongmenghui and the Gelaohui besieged the city, and the court ordered Duanfang to take Hubei New Army troops into Sichuan, thinning the garrison at Wuhan. 14 15

In Wuhan the Literary Society and the Progressive Association, revolutionary groups inside the New Army, set up a headquarters for the rising on 24 September with sixty delegates from New Army units, choosing Jiang Yiwu as commander and Sun Wu as chief of staff. The date first set, the Mid-Autumn Festival on 6 October, was postponed for lack of preparation. On 9 October a bomb Sun Wu was making in the Russian concession at Hankou exploded and badly injured him; his identity was discovered at the hospital and the membership lists fell into Qing hands. The Viceroy of Huguang, Ruicheng, rounded up revolutionaries and executed several leaders, and the decision was taken to rise rather than wait for arrest. 15 1

At about seven in the evening of 10 October men of the engineers led by Xiong Bingkun fired first, and New Army units under the provisional commander Wu Zhaolin attacked the viceroy’s residence through the night. Ruicheng fled, the Qing garrison collapsed, and by the morning of the 11th all of Wuchang was in revolutionary hands. The rebels had no figure of standing to lead them: Sun Yat-sen was raising money among overseas Chinese in the United States, and Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren could not arrive in time. So they made Li Yuanhong, commander of the 21st Mixed Brigade, military governor of the Hubei Military Government; he was reportedly dragged from under his wife’s bed at gunpoint. On the 12th the revolutionaries took Hankou and Hanyang as well. 15 16 3

The Battle of Yangxia and the independence of the provinces

On 14 October the court sent the Beiyang Army against Wuhan under Yinchang and Feng Guozhang, and recalled Yuan Shikai, dismissed by the regent Zaifeng in 1908 and living in retirement, as Viceroy of Huguang. When the revolutionaries, helped by railway workers, won the first fight for the northern station at Liujiamiao, the court removed Yinchang and handed real power to Yuan. Feng Guozhang’s 1st Army and Duan Qirui’s 2nd Army attacked Hankou with heavy artillery and machine guns at the end of October, and Feng had the resisting city set on fire; it burned for three days and much of it was destroyed. Hankou fell on 1 November. 17 18 19

Huang Xing arrived from Shanghai on 28 October and took over command of the revolutionary forces on 3 November. Overruling Sun Wu and others who wanted to defend Hanyang, he tried to retake Hankou, but the river crossing of 17–18 November failed with more than 800 casualties. From 21 November the Beiyang Army assaulted Hanyang, and after seven days and nights of street fighting, amid distrust between the Hubei and Hunan units, the revolutionaries abandoned Hanyang on the 27th. More than 3,300 revolutionary fighters and residents died defending it. Yet the 41 days of resistance were not wasted: in that time thirteen provinces beyond Hubei declared independence from the Qing. 17 10

The “restoration” of each province took its own form. On 22 October the Tongmenghui’s Jiao Dafeng took Changsha in Hunan with New Army units; Mao Zedong, then a middle-school student in the city, joined the revolutionary army as a private and served for six months. The same day the Manchu quarter of Xi’an in Shaanxi was stormed and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Manchus were massacred. On the 29th Yan Xishan rose in Shanxi and on the 30th Cai E in Yunnan, each at the head of New Army troops; Zhu De, a product of the Yunnan military academy where Cai taught, served in Cai’s force. On 3 November Chen Qimei rose in Shanghai, and on the 4th the young Chiang Kai-shek and others took Hangzhou. 1 20 21 22

In many provinces independence was less a revolution than a compromise. In Jiangsu the constitutionalists and gentry persuaded the Qing governor Cheng Dequan to set up a military government with himself as governor, and in Anhui too the governor declared independence. Guangdong became independent on 9 November after Hu Hanmin won over its naval commanders, and Sichuan on 27 November under Pu Dianjun, newly released from prison. In Anhui Chen Duxiu became head of the secretariat under the new governor. On 2 December the Jiangsu–Zhejiang army took Nanjing. On the frontiers Outer Mongolia proclaimed independence under the Bogd Khan on 29 December, and in Tibet the Qing garrison was driven out. 1 23 24 25

North–South negotiations and the Nanjing provisional government

As the revolution spread, the court appointed Yuan Shikai prime minister of the imperial cabinet on 1 November and on the 3rd hastily promulgated the Nineteen Articles turning the Qing into a constitutional monarchy. It was too late. Having shown the Beiyang Army’s superiority by retaking Hanyang, Yuan stopped his offensive, since a revolution crushed completely would leave him dispensable once more. A ceasefire took effect on 1 December, and on 18 December Yuan’s representative Tang Shaoyi and the revolutionaries’ Wu Tingfang opened North–South talks in Shanghai. The refusal of foreign banks to lend to either side pushed both to negotiate. The core of the deal was that if Yuan secured the emperor’s abdication, the south would back him as president. 1 17 18

Sun Yat-sen learned of the Wuchang Uprising from a newspaper in the United States and reached Shanghai on 25 December. On 29 December, in an election at Nanjing in which 45 delegates from seventeen provinces cast one vote per province, he received 16 of the 17 votes and became provisional president. On 1 January 1912 Sun proclaimed the Republic of China and made the day the first day of the first year of the Republic. Li Yuanhong became vice-president; Huang Xing became minister of the army and chief of staff, Cai Yuanpei minister of education, and the constitutionalist industrialist Zhang Jian minister of commerce. The five-coloured flag, standing for the union of Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan, was adopted as the national flag. 26 15 1

But the Nanjing government had neither money nor an army. Each provincial military government kept its own troops, and there was no unified revolutionary force to face the Beiyang Army. If Yuan refused the presidency and resumed fighting, the republic could collapse in civil war or before foreign intervention, and Sun promised early on to hand Yuan the office. Reading Sun’s platform in July 1912, Lenin praised him as the voice of “militant and sincere democracy”, but warned that liberal bourgeois such as Yuan Shikai had cringed before the emperor yesterday, betrayed him on seeing the strength of the revolution, and would betray the democrats tomorrow. 26 7 27

The abdication edict and the Provisional Constitution: a republic by compromise

On 16 January 1912 eighteen Tongmenghui members threw bombs at Yuan Shikai’s carriage at Donghuamen in Beijing; about ten guards died, but Yuan was not seriously hurt. On 22 January Sun Yat-sen announced that he would resign the presidency in Yuan’s favour if Yuan supported the emperor’s abdication. Yuan pressed the Empress Dowager Longyu, warning that the imperial family would not be safe if the abdication did not come before the revolutionaries reached Beijing, while some fifty Beiyang generals led by Duan Qirui sent telegrams demanding a republic. On 3 February the empress dowager gave Yuan full powers to negotiate the terms of abdication. 1 6 19

On 12 February the Empress Dowager Longyu issued the abdication edict in the name of the six-year-old Xuantong Emperor. Declaring that “in the universal desire of the heart of the people may be discernible the will of Heaven”, it transferred “the ruling power to the common citizenry” and ordained “a constitutional republican” form of government; it charged Yuan Shikai with organising a provisional republican government with full powers and with keeping the lands of the five races, Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan, together as one Republic of China. That clause later served as the legal basis for the Republic’s claim to all Qing territory. Zhang Jian is believed to have drafted it, though the Shanghai paper Shen Bao reported at the time that another official’s draft had been revised by Xu Shichang. 6 1

Under the Articles of Favourable Treatment, Puyi kept his imperial title, was treated with the protocol due to a foreign monarch and could live in the inner northern half of the Forbidden City, while the Republic was to pay the imperial household four million silver taels a year. The money was never fully paid, and the “little court” inside the Forbidden City survived until 1924, when the warlord Feng Yuxiang abolished the Articles and expelled Puyi. The revolution ended Manchu rule but inherited the Qing state apparatus and army intact. Violence against Manchus continued in Beijing and elsewhere, and as the bannermen’s livelihoods collapsed, many Manchus fell into deep poverty. 5 6 1

As his condition for stepping down, Sun demanded that the capital stay at Nanjing. On 14 February the Provisional Senate voted 20 to 5 for Beijing, then the next day chose Nanjing by 19 to 6. Cai Yuanpei and Wang Jingwei went to Beijing to escort Yuan south, but on the night of 29 February troops of Cao Kun, an officer loyal to Yuan, mutinied, looting and burning the city, and Yuan used this as his excuse to stay in the north. On 10 March he was inaugurated in Beijing as provisional president. Just before, on 8 March, the Senate passed the Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China to bind his power, promulgating it on the 11th; it vested sovereignty in the whole people and adopted a cabinet system in which the president’s orders required ministerial countersignature. Lu Xun, who joined the Ministry of Education in February, worked in Nanjing and then moved with the ministry to Beijing. 1 26 28 29 30

Parliament and assassination: the first elections and the Second Revolution of 1913

On 3 March 1912 the Tongmenghui, hitherto a secret society, became an open political party, and by May it was China’s largest party with some 550,000 members. On 25 August it merged with other groups to form the Kuomintang. In the first parliamentary elections, held from late 1912 into early 1913, only about 10 per cent of adult men could vote, some 40 million gentry, landowners and middle-class merchants. Organised by the thirty-year-old Song Jiaoren, the Kuomintang won 269 of 596 seats in the House of Representatives and 123 of 274 in the Senate, becoming the largest party. Song argued openly that parliament should form the cabinet and curb the president’s powers, and was widely tipped as prime minister. 9 31 32

On 20 March 1913, on his way to Beijing, Song Jiaoren was shot twice at Shanghai railway station and died two days later. The gunman Wu Shiying had been hired by Ying Guixin, a Shanghai underworld figure close to Yuan’s regime, and the trail of evidence led to the premier Zhao Bingjun. But the main suspects were themselves killed or vanished, and Yuan was never officially implicated. Parliament opened on 8 April, and that month Yuan raised a £25 million Reorganisation Loan from British, French, Russian, German and Japanese banks without parliamentary approval, using it to finance the Beiyang Army. Kuomintang members of parliament called for his removal. 32 33 1

In June Yuan dismissed one Kuomintang military governor after another, Li Liejun in Jiangxi, Hu Hanmin in Guangdong and Bo Wenwei in Anhui. When Li Liejun declared Jiangxi independent at Hukou on 12 July, Huang Xing did the same for Jiangsu at Nanjing on the 15th, followed by Anhui, Shanghai, Guangdong and Fujian, and in August Sichuan and Hunan. This was the “Second Revolution” of the guichou year. But the anti-Yuan armies were improvised and poorly paid, and on 22 July they were beaten at Xuzhou by the Beiyang forces of Feng Guozhang and Zhang Xun. On 1 September Zhang Xun’s troops took and looted Nanjing, and with the fall of Chongqing on 12 September the revolt ended within two months. Sun and Huang fled to Japan, and Chen Duxiu, who had served under Bo Wenwei, left for Japan with him. 33 10 23 34

Victorious, Yuan was elected full president by parliament on 6 October, and the next day thirteen countries including Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Japan recognised the Republic of China together (the United States had been the first great power to do so, on 2 May). In November Yuan outlawed the Kuomintang, and parliament was formally dissolved in January 1914. The Constitutional Compact of 1 May 1914, produced by 66 men of Yuan’s choosing, gave the president practically unlimited power over the military, finances, foreign policy and citizens’ rights. In each province a military governor with his own army now stood beside the civil authority, laying the foundations for later warlordism. Li Yuanhong kept the vice-presidency but was in effect confined in Beijing, and Cai E, removed as governor of Yunnan, was likewise kept under watch in the capital. 1 33 18 16 21

The Twenty-One Demands and the president who would be emperor

When the First World War broke out, Japan declared war on Germany in August 1914 and seized Qingdao and the German rights in Shandong. On 18 January 1915 Minister Hioki Eki privately handed Yuan the Twenty-One Demands drawn up by the Ōkuma Shigenobu cabinet. Divided into five groups, they covered the transfer of German rights in Shandong, extended leases and privileges in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, control of the Hanyeping iron complex and a ban on coastal concessions to others, while Group 5 would have had China hire Japanese advisers to run its finances and police. Beijing leaked the contents to the powers to gain time, and Japan, dropping Group 5, presented the rest on 7 May as an ultimatum with a two-day deadline. Yuan signed the treaties on 25 May, and a nationwide boycott of Japanese goods followed. 35 18

That summer a campaign to restore the monarchy began. On 3 August Yuan’s American constitutional adviser Frank Goodnow published a memorandum arguing that monarchy suited China better than a republic, and Yang Du, with Yan Fu, Liu Shipei and others, formed the Peace Planning Society to proclaim that “republicanism does not apply to China”. “Petition groups” across the country flooded in demands to change the form of state. Liang Qichao, leader of the Progressive Party, published an article opposing the change in the monthly Greater China. On 11 December 1915, 1,993 elected national representatives unanimously approved a constitutional monarchy and offered Yuan the throne; accepting the second offer, he proclaimed the Empire of China on the 12th, with the era name Hongxian and accession rites set for 1 January 1916. Lu Xun, at the Ministry of Education, was forced to take part in rituals honouring Confucius. 36 37 30

The opposition went beyond anything Yuan had expected. Cai E, Liang Qichao’s pupil, slipped out of Beijing under surveillance in November and returned to Yunnan by way of Japan. On 23 December he telegraphed a demand that the monarchy be cancelled within two days, and on the 25th, with Tang Jiyao and Li Liejun, declared Yunnan independent and raised the National Protection Army. Guizhou followed on the 27th. Yuan sent 80,000 men, but they were defeated in Sichuan, where Zhu De fought as a regimental commander in the National Protection Army. The Beiyang generals, whose troops had never once been paid by the imperial government, did not fight hard, and close lieutenants such as Feng Guozhang and Duan Qirui opposed the monarchy. Guangxi declared independence in March 1916 and Guangdong and Zhejiang in April, Japan turned towards overthrowing Yuan, and Progressive Party branches agitated for independence in the provinces. 21 38 36 37 22 19 39

Yuan cancelled the monarchy on 22 March and abolished the Hongxian era the next day; he had been emperor for 83 days. He tried to return to the presidency, but demands for his resignation did not stop, and in May Shaanxi, Sichuan and Hunan also declared independence. On 6 June Yuan died of kidney failure at 56. Li Yuanhong succeeded him as president, and the National Protection War ended on 14 July when the provinces rescinded their declarations of independence. That October Huang Xing died in Shanghai, and in November Cai E died in Fukuoka in Japan, where he had gone for treatment. Yuan’s death cut the last thread that had held the Beiyang Army together. 36 38 21 10 18

Restoration and Constitutional Protection: the opening of the warlord era

In June 1916 Li Yuanhong restored the Provisional Constitution and made Duan Qirui premier, and on 1 August parliament reconvened after two and a half years. But real power lay with Duan. The two clashed bitterly over breaking with Germany and entering the First World War, and when Duan’s secret loans from Japan came to light, Li dismissed him on 23 May 1917. Duan withdrew to Tianjin to muster troops and the generals deserted the government. Li called on Zhang Xun to mediate and, at his demand, dissolved parliament on 13 June. Then Zhang Xun, the Qing loyalist known as the “Queue General” for refusing to cut his queue, proclaimed Puyi’s restoration in Beijing in the early hours of 1 July, together with Kang Youwei and others. 16 40 34 8

The Dingsi Restoration lasted twelve days. Taking refuge in the Japanese legation, Li Yuanhong appointed Feng Guozhang acting president and Duan Qirui premier again, and Duan marched on Beijing with his troops from Tianjin. A republican aircraft dropped three bombs on the Forbidden City, the first aerial bombardment by a Chinese air force. On 12 July Zhang Xun fled to the legation quarter, and Kang Youwei took refuge in the American legation. Li refused to return to office, and Duan, credited with crushing the restoration, took control of the government and declared war on Germany on 14 August. The dissolved parliament was not recalled; Duan convened a new senate with Liang Qichao. 40 8 41

Sun Yat-sen raised the banner of “Constitutional Protection”, pledging to defend parliament and the Provisional Constitution. In August 1917 part of the navy and about a hundred former members of parliament gathered in Guangzhou and set up a military government, and on 1 September 84 of the 91 members present elected Sun generalissimo. Two governments now coexisted in Beijing and Guangzhou. But the strength of the Guangzhou government lay with southern warlords such as Tang Jiyao of Yunnan and Lu Rongting of Guangxi, and after quarrelling with them Sun left Guangzhou in 1918. The internationally recognised government remained the one in Beijing, but whoever held troops took turns to be its master. 41 42 43

Duan Qirui’s Anhui clique, the Zhili clique of Feng Guozhang and then of Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, and Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian clique took Beijing in turn. Duan was ousted in the Zhili–Anhui War of 1920, the Zhili–Fengtian Wars of 1922 and 1924 swept north China, and in 1924 Feng Yuxiang betrayed Wu Peifu and seized Beijing. Warlord wars were financed by taxes, opium and foreign loans, and the countryside suffered requisition and plunder; Wu Peifu crushed railway workers’ strikes with executions. The word junfa, “warlord”, was itself introduced by Chen Duxiu in the Weekly Review in December 1918, borrowed from the Japanese gunbatsu. The chaos taught the May Fourth generation that the name of “the republic” guaranteed nothing, and left Sun Yat-sen convinced that revolution was impossible without an army and a mass party of his own. 43 44 19

Assessment: revolution or change of dynasty?

How the 1911 Revolution is read is bound up with later politics. Both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China regard themselves as its legitimate heirs and honour Sun Yat-sen as father of the nation; 10 October is the Republic’s National Day on Taiwan and the anniversary of the revolution on the mainland. 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” that preceded the new-democratic one. In “On New Democracy” (1940) Mao Zedong wrote that “in its social character, this revolution is a bourgeois-democratic and not a proletarian-socialist revolution”, and that it was “still unfinished” because its enemies were still very strong. 1 45 3

Marxist interpretation focused on class leadership. Mao held that in 1911 the proletariat had not yet appeared as an independent class force and merely followed the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, and in “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” (1939) he traced the revolution’s miscarriage to the fact that “the proletariat did not consciously participate in it and the Communist Party was not yet in existence”. Earlier, in 1912, Lenin compared Sun’s land programme to the Russian Narodniks, arguing that his theory of “preventing” capitalism was reactionary but that his programme of land nationalisation, transferring rent to the state, was in fact the most thoroughgoing capitalist agrarian programme. Lenin predicted that Yuan Shikai would manoeuvre between monarchy and revolution and that, as the Shanghais multiplied, the Chinese proletariat would form a party of its own; his “The Awakening of Asia” (1913) portrayed China as a land of seething political activity. 45 46 27 47

Social historians stress how little the revolution changed the social structure. Its main participants were soldiers, traditional bureaucrats and local gentry, who kept their regional power afterwards; some became warlords, and the people’s standard of living did not improve. In 1921, ten years on, Lu Xun satirised this hollowness in The True Story of Ah Q: the village landlord families promptly become revolutionaries to keep their power, while Ah Q, the day labourer who wanted to join the revolution, is executed without understanding why. Historians have also looked again at its violence: one estimate puts the Manchus killed at Xi’an alone at 10,000 to 20,000, and Manchu garrisons were also massacred at Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Taiyuan and Fuzhou. Even the number of provinces that seceded is given differently by measure: thirteen of the eighteen provinces of China proper, fourteen during the Battle of Yangxia, or seventeen or eighteen by the end of the year. 1 48 17 6 3

Even so, “a China without an emperor” was an irreversible change: the two restorations by Yuan Shikai and Zhang Xun each collapsed within months or weeks. What the revolution left the socialist movement was above all the lesson of failure. Mao Zedong, who first met socialism in Changsha through pamphlets of Jiang Kanghu’s Chinese Socialist Party, Chen Duxiu, who served the Anhui military government and fled after the defeat of the Second Revolution, and Zhu De, who fought in Cai E’s National Protection Army, all went looking within a decade for answers beyond the republic. Sun Yat-sen himself finally chose to rebuild his party and army with Soviet help. As Mao wrote, the May Fourth Movement opened a new stage with a thorough and uncompromising opposition to imperialism and feudalism that the 1911 Revolution had lacked. 20 23 22 43 45