Modern China. A Very Short Introduction by Rana Mitter Read Free Book Online

and other rebels to be beaten back. But this moved infl uence away from the central government and squarely towards to the provinces.
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    This would be a factor when the empire fi nally did collapse: the ground had been set for China to divide into feuding provinces led by warlords, each with his own local army, something that would have been harder to imagine in 1800.
    Finally, it may have been the reforms themselves that doomed the dynasty. Empires often collapse when they try to reform, and unleash a forum for voices that are hostile to those in authority.
    It was in 1989, during the most liberal era of communist rule, and not in 1969, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, that protesters fi lled Tian’anmen Square demanding that the leadership step down. It was under the liberal Gorbachev, not the brutal Stalin, that the USSR fi nally collapsed.
    The abolition of the examinations, for instance, created a huge The old order and the ne
    number of angry local elites. For centuries, men would spend years learning the Confucian classics in the hope that they might pass the increasingly severe level of examinations that would let them rise to local and even national status in the bureaucracy. Thousands of young (and not so young) men took w
    these examinations and very few passed. But now, the government abolished their raison d’être at a stroke. From 1898 onwards, with the sudden ending of a promising series of reforms, too many of China’s elites no longer trusted the Qing to reform China successfully. The Xinzheng reforms were not too little, too late, but perhaps too much, too late.
    Among the fi gures dedicated to ending, rather than reforming, the dynasty’s rule was the Cantonese revolutionary Sun Yatsen (1866–1925). Sun and his Revolutionary League made multiple attempts to undermine Qing rule in the late 19th century, raising sponsorship and support from a wide-ranging combination of diaspora Chinese, the newly emergent middle class, and traditional secret societies. In practice, his own attempts to end Qing rule were unsuccessful, but his reputation as a patriotic 29
    fi gure dedicated to a modern republic gained him high prestige among many of the emerging middle-class elites in China. As it turned out, however, his stock was less high among the military leaders who would have China’s fate in their hands for much of the early 20th century.
    The end of the dynasty came suddenly, and had nothing directly to do with Sun Yatsen. Throughout China’s southwest, popular feeling against the dynasty had been fuelled by reports that railway rights in the region were being sold off to foreigners. A local uprising in the city of Wuhan in October 1911 was discovered early, leading the rebels to take over command in the city and hastily to declare independence from the Qing dynasty. Within a space of days, then weeks, most of China’s provinces did the same thing. Provincial assemblies across China declared themselves in favour of a republic, with Sun Yatsen (who was not even in China at the time) as their candidate for president. Yuan Shikai, leader hina
    of China’s most powerful army, went to the Qing court to tell them that the game was up: on 12 February 1912, the last emperor, the Modern C
    6-year-old Puyi, abdicated.
    The crisis of the republic
    In 1912, the Republic of China was declared. In 1949, Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The 37 years of the Republic were dismissed by the Communists as a time of failure and broken promises, and in general, they continue to be regarded as a dark time in China’s modern history. Certainly there was much to condemn during the period: poverty, corruption, and China’s weakness in the international system. Yet, as in Weimar Germany, another period of political turmoil, the chaos actually cleared space for new ideas and a powerful cultural renaissance to begin. In terms of freedom of speech and cultural production, the