Power, Rights and Duties in Chinese History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution, by Xiaowei Zheng.
Chinese Review International, 2017
This study offers an important new framework for understanding China's 1911 Revolution by bringing intellectual change to the fore as the most decisive factor in creating the conditions for revolution. Zheng argues that: "The revolution was a political transformation spearheaded by new ideas, in particular, the notions of rights, equality and popular sovereignty, which stimulated the Chinese elite to change the political order" (p. 9). While Zheng largely makes this point through a case study of the revolutionary experience of Sichuan province, she embeds this carefully into a broader analysis of the emergence of a Chinese consensus in support of constitutionalism as the prerequisite for modern reforms. Pursuing this point, Zheng argues that the 1911 Revolution reflected a major shift in China's political culture that was more important than the simple end of China's long tradition of imperial governance. Zheng's original research on the 1911 Revolution in Sichuan, which provided the basis of her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California-San Diego, clearly followed in the footsteps of her mentor, Joseph Esherick, whose Reform and Revolution: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (1976) has dominated Western scholarship on the Revolution for many decades. The end result of Zheng's research, though, has ended up challenging Esherick's approach and thesis in key ways. Zheng does follow Esherick's lead in rejecting the orthodox Chinese narrative that mainly sees the 1911 Revolution as the result of the dedicated efforts of Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionary party, the Tongmenghui. Thus, Zheng argues that the participation of some members of
The Chinese Revolutionary Movement: Millenarianism, Leadership, Nationalism, and Prejudice
The 19 th Century was not kind to the Chinese and was filled with many natural disasters and wars alongside the Qing's transformation into a semi-colonial state. The Chinese masses responded to the instability first with mass rebellions, such as that of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. These revolts forced some economic and military reforms in the Qing that stabilized the state to some extent. Many fled the country as coolies or as students educated in European universities. The students came back as radicals, inspiring revolutions, and protests across the weakening Qing domain. This led to the Chinese Revolutionary Movement that had the characteristics of millenarianism, nationalism, prejudice, and the somewhat symbolic leadership of Sun Yat-sen. These characteristics are mentioned commonly in many works on the Movement such as Wong's The Origins of An Heroic Image, Rhoads' Manchus and Han, and Kuang-sheng Liao's Antiforeignism and Modernization in China 1860-1980, but none connect all of them together; their true connection lies within racial class warfare. The Qing could be regarded as the most successful dynasty to have ever ruled China because it was during this period that China ruled the most territory and had the highest population in its history. The First Opium War exposed problems, triggering millenarian peasant Jalics 2 rebellions such as the Taiping, Dungan, and Red Turban revolts. Crushing these rebellions required foreign assistance, reformist bureaucrats, and industrialization in what became known as The Self-strengthening Movement. Over the course of decades, bureaucrats like Li Hong Zhang created new artillery arsenals, a naval dockyard at Fuzhou, and the China Merchants' Steamship Navigation Company that competed with foreign steamships for coastal trade 1. These reforms made the state more effective and more prosperous, but nothing fundamentally changed, setting the stage for the Chinese Revolutionary Movement. There are many works on the Chinese Revolutionary Movement focusing on race and class in China as well as the image of Sun Yat-sen. Wong articulates the constructed image of Sun Yat-sen in his The Origins of An Heroic Image, leading to me using it to explain how Sun was perceived in the wake of his famous detainment. Rhoads' Manchus and Han notably defines how unequal the Qing system was for the Han, welcoming the comparison between it and the segregated American South. Rhoads' understanding of the Han's racial status and material conditions led me to coin the phrase racial class warfare. Millward took the ideas of this unequal system and showed how it affected the Hui in Beyond the Pass. To me, it is important to understand the development of anti-Manchuism by beginning with the unequal Qing system and then focusing on the Han response to it. Now, this paper will attempt to elaborate briefly on the context of Chinese Racial Class Warfare. The Chinese have often been the dominant race or ethnicity in dynastic times, but the Qing separated themselves by making the Manchu dominant. The Manchus were the rulers in a social sense and in an economic sense, leaving their non-Manchu subjects destitute and resentful. This paper will attempt to investigate racial class warfare by looking at the unequal Qing system, 1 Jack Gray. Rebellions and Revolutions: China From the 1800s to the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 118 Jalics 3 the activities and writings of Sun and his comrades, and the 19 th century religious beliefs of the Chinese people to argue for the connection of Sun's image, anti-Manchuism, nationalism, and millenarianism through racial class warfare. Racial class warfare meant that the Han, and in some sense the Hui, confronted both the racial inferiority and the economic inequality that came from Qing rule. This paper will begin with analyzing Sun as the Avatar of Racial Grievances since he is often known as the Movement's symbolic leader and was one of its most copious writers. This paper will also continue to use Sun's western name instead of his other names since he cultivated his western fame as Sun Yat-sen. Sun as the Avatar of Racial Grievances The end of the First Sino-Japanese War exposed the Qing's inability to protect the population, leading to the loss of Taiwan and not having Korea as a vassal. This loss of territory and confidence led to new calls for reform, such as when the doctor Sun Yat-sen wrote to the official Li Hong Zhang in 1894 that "it is urgent that the agricultural sciences be promoted and that and that planting, and husbandry be constantly improved so as to speed up growth and multiply production." 2 Sun's origins from an agricultural family made him familiar with the hardships of Chinese agricultural life. His father had to work multiple jobs to supplement their meager farmland 3. Since Sun's plea to Li failed, he was led to help organize the First Guangzhou Uprising, one of his first instances of anti-Manchu action. The First Guangzhou Uprising was an insurrection that established many of the precedents for anti-Qing insurrections for the next 17 years. The plan was for intellectuals and secret societies to come together and take over a major city before spreading the revolution. Part of this plan was the smuggling of arms into Canton and the assassination or kidnapping of the Jalics 4 governor and many other officials 4. The insurrection capitalized on unpaid soldiers and vast outrage against the incompetency and inequities of the Qing Dynasty, channeling anti-Manchu rage into what they hoped would be a mass uprising. Most of the Cantonese contingent of the Qing army was dismissed at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, funneling many discontent soldiers into the Uprising 5. Sun, Yang Quyun, Lu Haodong, and other intellectuals in the conspiracy believed in founding a Chinese Republic and removing colonial governments from China. Tensions ran high as protestors confronted the police near Canton's guildhall, leading to arrests and more direct action while new taxes squeezed the people dry 6. Yang oversaw fundraising, raising thousands from dedicated revolutionaries who sold their houses and from a secretive Hong Kong merchant, collecting around HK$20,000 in total 7. Nonetheless, local law enforcement disrupted the insurrection and arrested many of the revolutionaries, who were subsequently executed. More would have been arrested had many of the conspirators' papers not been burned and many weapons not been hidden 8. Anti-Manchu resentment had failed to trigger a mass uprising. Sun and Yang Chu Yun fled abroad as even their home of Hong Kong banned them. The historian John Fairbank notably described Hong Kong as "opposed to being a base for antimainland troublemakers" 9. The colonial governments in China had fought hard to get favorable trade relationships with China and were not going to give them up for a movement that had lost hard. Anti-Manchu action was being deliberately restrained by foreigners, creating resentment
Ming Qing Yanjiu
In 1911, only a few weeks after the Wuchang Uprising, Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858-1927) claimed a stop to the Revolution. Crying against the “poisonous” ideology of ethnic nationalism that was “smashing ten thousand li of land to pieces”, sacrificing a whole country to establish a system “unfit for China” such as the Republic, the 53-year-old philosopher from Guangdong - thirteen years after the dramatic failure of the ‘Hundred Days’ Reform’ - expressed his stance against Revolution through ten essays, collected under the title Jiuwanglun 救亡論 (“Saving the Country”) and published later in 1913. This article discusses some extracts of essays no. 5 and no. 6, together with sections of Kang’s last major work (Datongshu 大同書, “The Book of Great Concord”), all related to the issue of ethnic nationalism. The author of Confucius as a Reformer 孔子改制考, who in the 1890s denounced the ‘forgery’ of the Ancient Texts to reveal the true and reformist nature of Master Kong’s teachings, in these texts points the finger at another ‘forgery’ – Han nationalism. Adopting a classical ‘culturalist-universalist’ approach, he argues that the preservation of a country is not linked to the race of its rulers, but to the transmission of its cultural heritage: “Isn’t the British king of Saxon descent?”, he asks, using a Western example to demonstrate how national identities are artificial constructions, even in ‘modern’ and ‘nationalist’ Europe. The desegregation of a multiethnic empire such as the Great Qing in the name of racial/ethnic identities is, according to Kang’s metaphysical interpretation of history, a step backwards in the Way towards Unity. Therefore, he says, the solution for China, in 1911 as it was in 1898, is the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Kang’s stance against nationalist revolution, albeit considered minority among his contemporaries - and partly defeated by history - is still useful to shed light over the deep ideological fractures that opened among Chinese intellectuals at the turning point of 1911. In addition, Kang’s criticism of ethnic nationalism is also interestingly similar to the most recent studies on the artificial nature of ‘collective identities’.