In 1898, a number of aggrieved scholars, led by the reformist Confucian Kang Youwei and his disciples, launched a petition to urge the Guangxu Emperor to reform Qing state practices and to embrace a more progressive historical stance. After one hundred days of hopeful and urgent activity, the movement was suppressed by the Empress Dowager Cixi, whose conservative advisors strongly counseled against all such destabilizing change. The emperor was placed under house arrest while Cixi, his adoptive mother, forcibly took over the regency and ruthlessly quashed any at court or elsewhere who might have supported Kang. Many of the most sought-after reformists escaped to Japan, enemy though it recently had been. Because Japan had new-style schools and political supporters of reform in Asia, as well as a written language still sufficiently close to Chinese, many stayed there, using it as a base from which to foment dissent against the Qing. Episodically pursued by Qing state agents abetted by Japanese police, the movement to fundamentally reform or oust the Qing nevertheless found a home in Japan.
The abandonment by a portion of the scholarly class of the tepid dynastically proposed solutions to China’s historical and contemporary problems proved to be one major impetus behind the Republican Revolution of 1911. The exiled thinkers and political activists in Japan and Hong Kong—who used the nascent forms of journalism and pamphleteering, and who were themselves not even all revolutionaries but rather also translators, writers, philosophers, and reforming Confucians—were joined by socially situated on-the-ground organizers of the Qing military, and of general social discontent, in shaping the Republican Revolution over the first decade of the twentieth century. Other social forces were marginally involved: for example, many merchant and commercial elites were sympathetic to the critique of the dynasty’s incompetence, and some even funded critical journals and publishing efforts that sponsored less dynasty-centric new forms of “universal history” (tongshi /
The dynasty itself did plenty to hasten this outcome. Indeed, aside from the military defeat by Japan, the routing from the court of reformist tendencies not controlled immediately by Cixi and her henchmen, and the related pursuit of progressive scholars into exile, the dynasty sustained a mounting fiscal crisis, a consequent increasing indebtedness to foreign banks and Euro-American-Japanese imperialist interests, and a last-ditch attempt to align with social forces of a rather atavistic sort. All of this spelled doom for dynastic survival.
The Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 indicates the desperation and growing irrelevance of dynastic governance to the imagined future of China and the Chinese state. In the north-central province of Shandong—birthplace of Confucius—a roiling discontent was brewing among local peasants, who saw their village lands occupied by Christian missionaries working in cahoots with local elites whose personal coffers were amply filled in return for their assistance. Forming a secret society known as the “Harmonious Fists” (ordinarily translated as “Boxers”), these locals, in a fit of murderous frustration, killed two German missionaries and went on a looting and killing rampage against local officials and those they called “rice Christians” (Chinese who became Christians allegedly only in order to obtain food). Through the end of 1899 into 1900, drawing adherents to their side with their mystical beliefs in their own invulnerability to bullets and their pledges to recover control over local affairs, the Boxers began to move toward Beijing. The wrath of imperialist gunboat retaliation fell swiftly and surely in Shandong. Yet, the Boxers moved quickly, growing in size and intensity as they swept into the North. They managed to reach Beijing with hugely swollen numbers of the frustrated and the faithful. The dynasty, seeing an opportunity to oppose the despised practices of Euro-American gunboat diplomacy in defense of missionary intrusion, seized the day and proclaimed their alliance with the rebels. The Boxer disruption of railway lines connecting Beijing to other parts of the country frightened the foreign community in Beijing enough to prompt them to send urgent telegrams to their various leaders seeking immediate assistance.
The Boxers and Qing military banners lay siege to the Legation Quarters, where diplomats, missionaries, and mercenaries from all the nations resided in the capital. After some brief moments of rousing success in isolating the foreigners, by June 20, 1900, the forces of world order came crashing down. In one of the first examples of a global “coalition of the willing,” eight allied powers (Austro-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Russia) marched upon Beijing. Led by the US Marines (whose leader was memorably played by Charlton Heston in the 1963 Hollywood epic 55 Days at Peking), the Boxers and Manchu Banners were soundly defeated. By mid July a wholesale massacre of all suspected Boxer sympathizers was proceeding unimpeded upon a now-defenseless population. The Qing court, initially buoyed by popular rumors of Boxer success, was forced to abandon the capital, protected in its flight by the very foreign coalition then rampaging against Beijing’s population. Cixi and her retinue waited out the events in the North.
Most elites—scholars, commercial merchants, bureaucrats, landlords—were horrified at the court’s support for the Boxers. In part, this was pure class hatred: How could the court throw in its lot with this motley, anti-modern, anti-progressive, mystical, uneducated crew of violent peasants? In part, this was connected to the increasing alienation elites experienced with relation to the dynasty, which could no longer pretend to represent a desired future path, or even a tolerable present, for the Chinese state. In part, there also were growing alliances between these domestic classes and foreign commercial and cultural power. Provincial leaders refused to declare solidarity with the court; indeed, in certain Southern provinces—Guangdong or Hunan, for example—irredentist sentiment became a subject of serious debate in newspapers and journals. The massacres and consequent huge death toll in the wake of the Boxers, in addition to the extreme disruptions to transport, the economy, and social order occasioned by those fleeing the desperate remnants of the Boxers and the foreign pursuit, received little to no sympathy from elites safely out of range. The Boxer Protocol—the final punitive treaty imposed in 1901—was another devastating blow to the territorial sovereignty and fiscal capacities of the Qing court.6 From this point on, the dynasty attempted to promote a series of mild reform measures, intended to enhance the governing capacity of the state. These reforms closely mirrored those undertaken earlier by Japan. Yet, all this was too little, too late.
Sounding yet another death knell to the integration of knowledge and dynastic rule, in 1905 the civil service exam system that had secured the relation between education and appointment in the dynastic bureaucracy was abolished. The link between educated men, classical texts, and governing logics was severed. Some die-hard preservationists advocated the reconstitution of these connections in a cognate form; many more-progressive types proceeded to establish new schools to teach new knowledges, while yet others who would have taken the exams now found new forms of employment in book writing and publishing and/or in journalism. Meanwhile, political novels flourished, and translations from abroad of countless philosophies, world histories, biographies of great men (and a few women),