China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl
their efforts, in part to ensure that a central government—not too weak but not too strong—could be forced, at gunpoint if necessary, to sign treaties disadvantageous to itself but of great advantage to the capitalist, missionary, and other expansions desired by the “free trade” leaders of the mid-nineteenth-century global North. Known as “self-strengthening” (ziqiang /
The post-Taiping economic and political “restoration” helped transform Qing social relations by placing more socioeconomic power in the hands of landowners, usurers (who mediated trade, in part by indebting producers and advancing capital on speculative crops such as silk and tea), and urban commercial and merchant elites, as well as by welding more closely together those local and provincial elites with global capitalist concerns—the latter imposed upon and increasingly incorporated into China through visible and invisible imperialist expansion into the everyday workings of social life. The concomitant growth of urban treaty ports—Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Xiamen (Amoy), Tianjin, and others—and such inland entrepôt cities as Wuhan/ Hankou (at the intersection of several riverine commercial routes) brought various types of local elites—merchants, literati, and so forth—into “an unprecedented social mixing,”5 as well as bringing this new mix into residential, political, social, and cultural proximity to colonial settlers from many countries, all of whom (aside from the Japanese) were now commonly lumped into the catchall category of “Westerner,” who came from somewhere now homogeneously called “the West.”
By the 1880s and 1890s, these transformations had seeped, unevenly, into everyday life, helping visibly or invisibly to restructure and recalibrate the rhythms and expectations of many. Agrarian producers were now often tied to the fluctuations of the global markets in which their commodity economy was increasingly embedded. Meanwhile, for elites accustomed to securing social status through state service, larger civil service exam quotas for those social sectors that had defended the dynasty against the Taipings led, in an immediate sense, to larger numbers of sons admitted to bureaucratic appointments. Primarily aimed at pacifying the Yangzi delta region, this helped further enhance the dominance of that area in relation to other regions of the empire. Small but increasing numbers of educated sons also were sent to new-style schools, or even sent abroad to study new forms of knowledge. Some girls were now being schooled as well, although not systematically, while a movement against footbinding—that congeries of practices that had been visited upon many Chinese girls since at least the fourteenth century and that had become a firm part of the marriage market—grew in the interstices of urban society, albeit only gaining major ground and persuasive power after the 1911 Republican Revolution.6
Meanwhile, various intellectual endeavors attempted to make “Western” and “Chinese” knowledge systems compatible, or at least comparable, either by separating them out so that each would pertain to a different albeit equivalent domain (as with the late-nineteenth-century saying “Western function serves Chinese essence” [zhongti xiyong /
The fall of the Qing and the Republican Revolution startlingly emerged from a combination of these social, intellectual, systemic, and military forces.
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