This research paper analyzes the causes of the Revolution of 1911 in China and its consequences. The principal forces which led to the overthrow of the Manchu regime (1644-1911) were a long process of internal decay coupled with the debilitating effects of the depredations of foreign powers which exposed the weakness of the regime while at the same time inhibited its ability to cope with revolutionary demands for change. The revolutionary forces which brought about the Revolution of 1911 lacked a coherent ideology, adequate trained cadres, organization and financing to effect a permanent revolution, but they set in motion forces which eventually did.
Ever since the middle of the 19th century, China's rigid political and social structure and its technological backwardness rendered it prostrate as the major European powers, Russia and Japan penetrated its economy, wrested special privileges from the Chinese government through the unequal Treaty System they imposed on China and competed with each other for control of China's outlying provinces, treaty ports and economic concessions. The Qing dynasty succeeded in putting down the Taiping peasant rebellion of the 1850s. The self-strengthening movement which began in the 1860s resulted in modest additions to China's military capabilities and economic progress, as the first steps were taken to import more modern ideas and technology from the West, but China could not prevent the loss of its tributary state of Vietnam to the French in the 1880s and was decisively defeated by rapidly modernizing Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Under the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, China lost all influence in Korea and ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands to Japan.
Between 1894 and 1898, various Chinese reformers sought to reconcile Confucian philosophy and traditional ways of life with the need to "transform the Chinese government into a modern . . . constitutional ...