China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl
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 decade of the twentieth century that elaborated, in weak or strong fashion, an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial motivation to spark a political if not also a social upheaval. Although the Chinese version of that anti-colonial rhetoric was bent at this time to the particular historical purpose of anti-Manchuism rather than anti-Euro-American imperialism, without a prior understanding of modern global anti-colonial and anti-imperialist theory and practice, this Chinese historical re-narrativization of the Manchus-as-modern-colonizers would not have been possible. The modernity of the Republican Revolution is in part located in this global temporal and spatial simultaneity. In the 1911 Revolution we thus see the definitive redefinition of the Chinese concept for “revolution” (geming /
By the late nineteenth century, the accumulated domestic weaknesses of the Qing were sufficiently