Peter Zarrow China in War

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.The New Text school’s reformism uprooted all three pillars.It criticised imperial despotism and traditional versions of classical learning.Yet it could not come to terms with the new nationalist and utilitarian values of the twentieth century.22The Qing and Confucianism were doomed together.Radical Confucianism might, possibly, have saved a more dynamic set of political leaders, but in the political reality of the late Qing it was too radical for the conservatives and not radical enough for the revolutionaries.21911: History and historiographyThe Revolution of 1911 remains curiously difficult to categorize.Three distinct schools of interpretation contended with each other over the rest of the century: that 1911 represented (1) the revolutionaries’ revolution; (2) the rising bourgeoisie’s revolution; and (3) the urban gentry’s revolution (which might not be a “revolution” at all).1 The events of 1911 and 1912 do not seem to belong in the same league as the great English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or, for that matter, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.Yet the 1911 Revolution not only overthrew the Qing dynasty after nearly 270 years of continuous rule but it also brought the imperial-dynastic system of some 2,100 years to an end.Of course, people at the time could not be sure the revolution did not represent just another turn of the dynastic cycle: the fall of the old and the rise of a new imperial family.Indeed, most peasants, if they heard about it at all, thought exactly that.Most educated Chinese, however, had a sense that something unprecedented had occurred.The real reason why 1911 does not seem to fit into our notions of what a revolution should be is that in many ways it did not result in a future clearly different from the past.The new “Republic of China” was not republican; many of the old Qing bureaucrats simply stayed in their jobs.Nor did culture, society, and the economy appear to change, even with the collapse of the imperial political structure.They were changing, but not as a direct result of the 1911 Revolution.Yet even if the Revolution failed to produce a new, effective political system, its effects were profound.The gentry class could not survive the loss of their special relationship with the emperor that the civil service examinations had ratified.The exams had been abolished in 1905; the last chance of basing some kind of new relationship on the old was destroyed in 1911.Other changes: China’s cities emerged from the 1911 Revolution looking outward to the rest of the world, less and less concerned with the political machinations of Beijing.Even the national and provincial bureaucracies that survived the immediate aftermath of 1911 disintegrated within the decade.Without some link to the imperial center, rural elites lost their legitimacy.If1911: History and historiography31the 1911 Revolution cannot be isolated as the prime cause of all these changes, since it was partly their reflection, it did stimulate further change.“Revolution” itself became a common way of thinking about change.It is important to understand what really went on in 1911 because the revolution was later mythologized.The two major contenders for power in China in the twentieth century were intent on fitting 1911 into a national myth – rather like the way the legitimacy of the sitting American president can be linked to 1776.The government of Taiwan today (still calling itself the “Republic of China”) traces its origins to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) and the Three People’s Principles; the government of the People’s Republic of China dates its creation to the Communist Revolution (1949), but also takes the 1911 Revolution as a pivotal moment in its prehistory.The PRC’s official historiography treats 1911 as the beginning of the bourgeois phase of a longer revolutionary – anti-feudal and anti-imperialist – struggle.The two governments, both with their actual roots in the 1920s, have created what might be called, respectively, the heroic and the Marxist interpretations of 1911.Western historians and social scientists comprise the third school; they look to long-term explanations that examine the key role played by relatively conservative social forces in the overthrow of the Qing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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