People of the Revolution and the USSR

Beiyang government and warlords Monarchy and royalism 1859–1916 ○ Illness

The Beiyang strongman who took over the 1911 revolution and tried to make himself emperor

Recalled after the 1911 Wuchang Uprising, he pressed both the Qing court and the revolutionaries, winning the emperor's abdication and the provisional presidency in 1912. He proclaimed a monarchy in December 1915, abdicated in March 1916, and died that June.

A soldier-official who built the Beiyang New Army in the late Qing. When the 1911 revolution broke out he pressed both the court and the revolutionaries, securing the Qing emperor’s abdication and his own installation as provisional president of the Republic in 1912. He then hollowed out parliament, dissolved the Kuomintang and, in late 1915, proclaimed himself emperor; provincial revolts forced him to cancel the monarchy in 1916, and he died months later. His death fractured the Beiyang army and opened the warlord era.

Qing dynasty state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1906–1967 ↓ Abdicated 1912 · natural causes

Last emperor of the Qing, puppet emperor of Manchukuo, and a “remoulded” citizen of the People’s Republic

Crowned China's last emperor before he was seven, he lost the throne to the 1911 revolution and was restored once in 1917. Through Manchukuo's chief executive and emperor to Soviet captivity in 1945, he was amnestied in 1959 and shown as a model of reeducation.

Enthroned at three as the Xuantong Emperor, he abdicated in the 1911 revolution. Expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, he went to the Japanese concession in Tianjin and in 1932 became chief executive, then emperor, of Japan’s puppet state Manchukuo. Captured by the Soviets in 1945 and returned to China in 1950, he was “remoulded” at the Fushun war criminals’ prison and pardoned in 1959. He lived as a gardener and later a political-consultative delegate in Beijing and died of illness in 1967, early in the Cultural Revolution.