9 - The republican revolutionary movement

Summary

Between the autumn of 1911 and the spring of 1912 a series of events occurred in China that has come to be known as the Revolution of 1911. Its most prominent feature was the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty and the replacement of the empire by a republic. Although analysts of the revolution have clashed on many issues,’ only recently has the very significance of the revolution been questioned. One leading scholar has found that there was so little social reform that the revolution was ‘a sham’; another finds that the old ruling class maintained itself much as it had in previous dynastic transitions and that the Revolution of 1911 was therefore merely another ‘dynastic revolution’. As a result of such challenges to older interpretations, the nature of the Revolution of 1911 has become a matter for hot debate.

Among the wealth of new ideas that have emerged from recent controversies, two provide the points of departure for this chapter. One is that the revolution encompassed not only the political change from dynasty to republic but also a variety of social changes, including the appearance of new social groups and the transformation of old ones. The revolution is therefore best understood as the 1900–13 phase of the twentieth-century social revolution, not merely as the 1911–12 phase of political change. Secondly, within this broader concept the importance of the revolutionaries is far less than what it was in older interpretations. This was a revolution bigger than all its leaders, ‘a revolution without real leadership’.