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 / )—the transfer of state power from the Manchu Qing to republican revolutionaries was no less momentous an occasion for being less immediately public.³ While significant political, cultural, and economic continuities obviously remained, history was nevertheless set on a new path.

      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 [] Revolution) succeeded in ousting the Qing through an almost-accidental accrual of ideological strength backed by military support. This coalition failed to translate into any enduring political unity. Despite the messiness of the denouement, the fall of the Qing marked an evental shift in China’s modern history. This shift was informed by and pushed forward through a revolutionary rethinking of the basis of Chinese sociopolitical and economic organization; it was, in addition, underpinned by and promoted through nascent social revolutionary upheavals in gender, ethnic, national, regional, and global relations. All of these forces combined in various ways to bring to the fore and propose (unfulfilled) solutions to the systemic problems of modernity as a process of necessarily locally and globally intertwined temporal and historical experience.

      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 / ), formed in 1905, that explicitly espoused anti-Manchu sentiment and theorized the modern world of nations in ethnic terms. As cited in the epigraph to this chapter, a number of military songs mobilized troop support for the revolution in just this way. Indeed, it is an abiding curiosity of the Republican Revolution that its anti-imperialist/anti-colonial animus was aimed far more at the Manchus (construed as alien occupiers of China) than at the Euro-American or Japanese powers that were more recently settling into—and violently imposing themselves in—territorially conceded areas around the empire. By the same token, the relatively quick disappearance of mono-ethnicity in favor of a multiethnic flag and national-state rhetoric ought to give some pause over claims to too tight an enduring connection to Han-centrism on the part of most of the revolution’s political and intellectual leaders.

      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 / ) away from its previous containment to dynastic cycles—“severing” (ge / ) the (dynastic) “mandate” (ming / ) for the purpose of bestowing that mandate on a new dynasty—toward a modern global version connoting the fundamental transformation of political (if not also social) power from one form of polity to another—in this case, from dynastic empire to nation-state. At the same time, we also have, through this revolutionary process, a fundamental social redefinition of what constituted “politics” or the realm of the political, which now became an arena of potentially wide public contention rather than one contained wholly within the court/state. The social opening of the realm of politics was as consequential an outcome as any, as it was through this political rearticulation that China and the world were rethought, not separately but in necessary conjunction; and it was in this necessary conjunction that new classes came into political activity while global philosophies and practices of politics, society, economy, and culture became significant for and in China. It was, hence, when the relatively closed-circuit (though by now attenuated), intertwined Confucian logics of Chinese society, politics, economics, and culture crumbled that the social-ideological foundations of the dynasty collapsed and a new syncretic political possibility was established.

      By the late nineteenth century, the accumulated domestic weaknesses of the Qing were sufficiently