THE REVOLUTION OF 1911 IN CHINA

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 lo

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tution. However, these reforms proved insufficient to stem strong forces for more radical change and may have helped produce the Revolution of 1911. The authority of the central government had been weakened by foreign pressures, control over its finances and infrastructure and by the Boxer Rising during which provincial warlords acted independently of Beijing. Foreign pressures triggered xenophobic nationalism of a reactionary variety. The reforms themselves and the creation of an urban, educated elite stimulated the demand for further changes. The unwise nationalization of the railroads offended nearly everyone, provincial gentry, nationalists and others. The Revolutionary Alliance which led to the Court's decision to cause the child emperor who had succeeded the Empress Dowager to the throne after her death in 1908 to hand over power to first Sun Yat-sen and then in 1912 to Yuan Shikai was a loose collection of political dissidents with a vague political and economic agenda and little organizing structure. Sun Yat Sen's Three Principles --nationalism, democracy and improved living standards for the masses lacked specifics. When combined with student demonstrations, this embryonic ideology had sufficient appeal to the elite and

Category: History - T