Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. xi, 358 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5036-0108-6.
This study has been completed at an important moment, contributing to the discussion of the most important milestone of modern Chinese history. The social and political ferment that prepared the way for the Xinhai Revolution and its aftermath set into motion the cataclysmic forces that soon transformed East Asia. Looking back to the final years of China’s last dynasty, while at the same time studying recent developments (for example, trends signalled by the National People’s Congress decision to remove the term limit for president), makes us think about parallels from history. The Qing rulers faced, as the Chinese Communist Party faces today, the dilemma of reforming an undemocratic system or reinforcing dictatorship. The other historical parallel is from Russia: the reforms of the last tsar and the fall of the Soviet system. In both cases, late-Qing and late-Tsarist reforms and economic growth set the stage for revolution. But the monarchies were incapable of simple compromise and of seeing the obvious. Completing the analogy, China’s present rulers want to avoid at all costs a breakup on the model of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the USSR.
Zheng’s approach is to take the democratic movement in Sichuan as a case study, as it came to be representative in many ways of the movements and uprisings across China leading up to October/November 1911. It was also the first province that year to mount a large-scale challenge to the central authorities. This choice flows from a focus on better understanding the political activity of the Constitutionalists, the broad layer of local elites that rose up to challenge dynastic rule inspired by the program of Liang Qichao. The intransigence of the court impelled the reform-minded gentry toward open resistance and revolt. As the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 argue, it would be an error to minimize the subversive impact of this revolt on the part of the Qing-era literate elite; it helps explain the rapid disintegration of the dynasty in its final days. Here we see the two-fold influence of the foreign powers: first by reducing the monarchs to its agents in making China a client state; and second, providing the source of subversive ideas about constitution and democracy in the universities where the future leaders of the revolution studied. The book thus serves as a counterbalance to previous studies that have emphasized the central role of the revolutionary Tongmenghui. The historical account concludes with the years immediately following the Qing abdication that marked the rapid breakdown of the revolution. The retreat and betrayal of the revolution in Sichuan mirrored the same across the new republic.
The question posed across the chapters is about the legacy: even in failure, what was the enduring impact of the 1911 Revolution, and what are its lessons for today? The greater part of the description and analysis is devoted to the antecedents, growth of constitutional and republican consciousness, the building of public awareness and political maturation, and preparations for the confrontation (chapters 2 to 7). The sections focused on the mass mobilization that sustained the Railway Protection Movement in particular help readers understand the breadth of the popular groundswell that a leadership based entirely in the middle and upper classes of Sichuan was able to lead. This, in fact, is still an interesting puzzle in some ways, given the internal contradictions within the constitutionalist leadership and seemingly contradictory aspects of its political program (for example, on the question of taxation). “The End” (chapter 8) comes quickly, and is about how it all unravelled.
From the period covered by chapters 2 through 7, the advances in the acceptance of democratic and constitutional principles as a human right by Sichuan’s citizens stands as the permanent acquisition. The same would apply at the national level. Despite the political confusion of the subsequent years, the same principles, in particular those tied to core commitments of national sovereignty in the face of the demands of foreign interests, were brought to center stage across the nation by the next generation of young people mobilized by the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement. During the next period of civil conflict and foreign invasion, again, a divided republican movement was unable to galvanize national consensus around a democratic program. In 1921, a new contender for power, of a different kind, had appeared. In Mainland China today, what exactly is the vestige of the 1911 Revolution, and to which social forces might its legacy correspond? On this question, the concluding chapter proposes that we take the “long term” view (257).
This study, as others before it, presents one difficult question above all. Even granting the serious limitations of the various components of the republican movement, we need to understand better how constitutionalists, reformers, and nationalists were unable to forge a viable democratic coalition. The weakness of the social class that led the revolution is an important factor taken into account by Chang P’eng-yüan in his study, “The Background of Constitutionalists in Late Qing China” (in China’s Republican Revolution, Harold Z. Schiffrin, ed. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994), 65–75). By all evidence, the components and factions of the incipient coalition, taken as a whole, represented the popular will of the vast majority of the new nation. Without a sufficiently robust military force of its own, only a united political coalition could have won over the decisive democratic sectors from the many dispersed military units, already existing and to be recruited. How the situation played out on the ground in Sichuan was how it was mirrored across the former empire. Regarding the broader lessons, the present review forms part of a series on the three centennials, that of the Russian Revolution (2017), the May Fourth Movement (2019), and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (2021). The first instalment, “Revolution in Russia and China: 100 years,” appearing in the International Journal of Russian Studies (6, no. 2 [2017]), predicted, incorrectly, that the first of the anniversaries would be commemorated prominently in Beijing.
Norbert Francis
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA