China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

were now sought after with huge enthusiasm by an urban reading public. New professional paths opened to educated men, and to a handful of educated women. The ideological and cultural sphere was invigorated and incredibly eclectic. Much of it contributed to the idea that the dynastic system was no longer a proper vessel or vehicle for the elaboration of a modern Chinese identity or polity in the twentieth-century world.

      At the same time, social change was rampant as global and Chinese commodity markets became more integrated. Intensification of land use proceeded rapidly albeit unevenly, even as the handicraft production fueled by rural women’s labor increasingly lost out to imported or urban-made manufactured goods. More and more, women from rural areas—whose productivity had been crucial to the economic survival of their households and who were now rendered surplus labor—were forced or lured into new urban-based manufacturing concerns—silk filatures, cotton mills, match factories—owned and operated by Japanese or Euro-American capitalists, or, more rarely, by local industrialists; other women and girls were sold by destitute households as prostitutes, concubines, or serving girls for richer families. With stiff competition from Japan, Italy, France, and the United States manufacturing similar commodities, women’s wages were low, and they were easily preyed upon by gangs and other cohorts employed by bosses to keep them in the factories and obediently in line. Thus, as the rural economy deteriorated, there was an accelerating subordination of rural to urban space, helping to reorganize fundamentally the historical valence of social and spatial relations, even while many aspects of the outward appearance of continuity and stagnation remained.⁷

      Widespread opium addiction—a problem that had begun to manifest in the early nineteenth century and that had rooted itself in practice up and down the urban and rural social ladders—facilitated international drug economies that were mercilessly exploitative, even while drug use and sale was outlawed domestically in Euro-America and Japan. These economies tied the Euro-American opium plantations and colonial states of South and Southeast Asia to China in close dependence. Colonial banks, whose capital funds were swollen and maintained in large part by opium revenue, controlled, to an ever-greater extent, the purse strings of the dynasty—even while powerful Chinese salt families, for example, started to transform their state-granted monopolies into dominance over other domestic economic spheres. These domestic concerns operated through the native Shanxi banking system that had for centuries facilitated inter-provincial trade through, among other modes, the verification of currency values (silver to copper valuation was one major issue, as copper was the currency in general use while silver was the currency of account). Yet, because colonial banks controlled the import and exchange value of silver, ultimately, financial affairs ended up running in and through that extraterritorially protected system. Throughout the late Qing period, in fact, the monetary situation became more and more muddled, as silver ingots, indifferently cast copper coin, paper currency, and other instruments of trade and exchange floated around the empire with varying, sometimes even arbitrary, degrees of value attached. There were times and places when opium served as the most stable medium of exchange. Only in the treaty ports, where currencies were strictly regulated by the colonial banks, was the monetary situation relatively clear.

      Tied up with the weakening situation of Qing finances, the problem of railway construction flared into a major socioeconomic issue of the last decade of the dynasty. Initially undertaken by British, French, German, Russian, and Japanese companies granted territorial rights through treaty provisions extracted at gunpoint, railway construction was at first resisted by conservative Qing administrators (among other reasons, it was harmful to the dynastic-controlled system of horses and postal relays). After 1895, railways were understood to be both central to and significant for military, commercial, and governing purposes. In the face of exhortations by provincial leaders, who saw railway revenues sucked up by foreign concerns, the Qing began, in 1904 and 1905, to lend large sums to Chinese companies for the construction of trunk lines, several of which were built. However, these were not really economically viable, and by 1911 the indigenous lines had fallen into bankruptcy. The Qing proceeded to nationalize and then pledge them to foreign banks as collateral for loans. The discontent among merchant and commercial elites and their resulting restiveness directly contributed to the abandonment of the dynasty during the revolutionary events of October 1911.

      Efforts at modernization—of institutions, of communication and commercial networks, of industry—went under the rubric of “wealth and power” (fuqiang / ). Through the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, indifferent to labor and the socially disruptive impact of their various schemes, urban-based commercial and merchant elites operating under these initiatives grew in social power and even in cultural prestige. Landowners, the historical gentry and acknowledged dominant class of Confucian dynastic China, held onto their economic and social positions increasingly by making alliances with, marrying their footbound daughters into, or sending sons to engage in the previously despised spheres of trade and commerce. Theorizations of these and other developments became part of a budding disciplinary transformation in knowledge production, some of which tried to reconcile social changes with re-interpretations of Confucian texts, while others ditched those texts altogether to take up modern theories of state and economy emanating from Japan, Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States. Scholar and publisher Yan Fu translated Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin; Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei’s student, introduced Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (a now-obscure German statist political theorist and jurist), and Friedrich List (a German theorist of national economics); others made available in Chinese the rudiments of socialism, anarchism, Russian utopianism, and feminism, for example. Theories of “survival of the fittest” jostled with natural rights theory, which competed with liberal and anti-liberal statist positions, juxtaposed to modernist and anti-modernist anti-statism—some of which, in turn, was funneled into revolutionary and nonrevolutionary nationalist thought. The lines of debate were rarely clear—other than as marked between pro- and anti-revolutionaries—and the cauldron of thought was constantly stirred in the heated journalistic mediasphere of the day.

      Sun Yatsen, not fully trained in Confucian texts or hampered by previous loyalties to one or another school of classical or foreign thinking, promoted in outline what he called the “Three Principles of the People” (sanmin zhuyi / ). A mild form of socialism intended to forestall the violence potentially produced by capitalist class division, Sun’s Three Principles were aimed at helping realize the ideals of republican equality and democracy. Beginning from the principle of land redistribution (derived, eclectically, from the American agrarian reformer Henry George), Sun attempted to theorize and map out how, in a post-dynastic world, Chinese were to be made economically productive, politically democratic, and globally sovereign. Often understood to be the better road not taken in China, the Three Principles continued to be fleshed out from the 1910s onward and have remained a touchstone of Chinese political and economic thinking. They were ostensibly embraced by republican revolutionaries and their successors throughout the century, even as the Three Principles increasingly became more incantatory than real as goals of state practice. Nevertheless, the eclecticism of their political and theoretical sources demonstrates well the range of thinking that informed the revolutionary endeavors of the anti-dynastic republicans in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was this eclecticism that helped delineate the parameters and inevitability of Qing ideological collapse.

      Among the first decrees of Sun’s government in January 1912, men were enjoined to cut their queues, the pigtails symbolizing fealty to the Manchu Qing Dynasty that they had been forced to wear for 268 years. In the first years of the new republic, most Han men complied, keeping barbers busy all over the empire. (Men in Mongolia, Tibet, Turkestan, and other peripheral regions held out longer, perhaps leery of the durability of the new order.) In more than mere sartorial terms, queue-cutting marked a definitive end to Qing claims to ruling legitimacy. A new national flag was promoted, in which a five-ethnicity unity (Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, Muslim) was proclaimed as a national state ideal, while a parliament was formed, extending voting rights to property-owning Han men. Women, who had fought the Qing in large numbers, had been promised full citizenship and a place at the political table; they were summarily booted from parliamentary