Читать книгу China’s Revolutions in the Modern World - Rebecca E. Karl - Страница 10

Has it occurred to you that men are our archenemy? … This situation is by no means confined to the ancient world and is just as prevalent in the modern world … nor is it a uniquely Chinese situation … There is no doubt that the Manchu court [of the Qing dynasty] should be overthrown, but I would like to point out that a Han sovereign or regime could be a disaster worse than the ones wrought by foreign rule.

—He-Yin Zhen, “On the Revenge of Women” (1907)¹

Raise the Han, Raise the Han

Destroy the Manchu, Destroy the Manchu,

Destroy the thieving Manchu.

—Military anthem, October 1911²

On February 1, 1912, the final abdication of the Qing was formalized at the Forbidden City in Beijing in a sad little tête-à-tête between the Empress Dowager Cixi and Yüan Shikai, the Qing’s former number one general, who had turned to uncertain revolutionary sympathies. (Already a traitor to the Qing, Yüan was soon enough to become a traitor to the republic, but that was history yet to be written.) A new government had already been proclaimed a month prior, on January 1, in Nanjing, where revolutionary leaders had gathered and had already begun to rule in the dynasty’s stead. The symbolism of the Gregorian calendrical timing of the proclamation was intentional: the dynastic time of the emperors was at an end, while the rural peasant time of lunar calendars was to be curtailed. A new China, a new nation among nations in solar time, was to prevail. Yet, historical time was also to begin anew: January 1912 was counted as year one of the republic. While no one stood on a rostrum in front of millions of cheering supporters—as was to happen in 1949 when Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China from Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tian’an men / )—the transfer of state power from the Manchu Qing to republican revolutionaries was no less momentous an occasion for being less immediately public.³ While significant political, cultural, and economic continuities obviously remained, history was nevertheless set on a new path.

Starting from the October 10, 1911 uprising of military contingents in the city of Wuhan, the sequence of military and political events leading to the deposing of the dynasty proceeded relatively quickly, even if the revolution had been some five decades in the making. As various troops defected, thus leaving the Qing relatively undefended, Sun Yatsen, who at the time was in Denver, Colorado, raising funds for the revolutionary effort, heard of the events through media reports. He rushed back to China (first to New York, via the transcontinental railway built by imported Chinese labor, then by steamship to London, overland to France, and from there, by sea to Shanghai), where he was proclaimed the first president of the Republic of China (ROC). A Cantonese-born, American-educated (in the newly US-occupied Pacific territory of Hawaii) Western medicine doctor turned revolutionary agitator who resided in British colonial Hong Kong, Sun embodied a symbolic figure of modern Chineseness that appealed to ordinary as well as educated Chinese, both at the time and subsequently. While formally the provisional president for only a few months (ousted by the ever-traitorous Yüan Shikai), Sun remained in constant opposition to the constituted ROC government until his death in 1925. However, he was and remains heralded as “the father of the nation” (guofu / ).

The Republican Revolution (also called the 1911 Revolution, or the Xinhai [] Revolution) succeeded in ousting the Qing through an almost-accidental accrual of ideological strength backed by military support. This coalition failed to translate into any enduring political unity. Despite the messiness of the denouement, the fall of the Qing marked an evental shift in China’s modern history. This shift was informed by and pushed forward through a revolutionary rethinking of the basis of Chinese sociopolitical and economic organization; it was, in addition, underpinned by and promoted through nascent social revolutionary upheavals in gender, ethnic, national, regional, and global relations. All of these forces combined in various ways to bring to the fore and propose (unfulfilled) solutions to the systemic problems of modernity as a process of necessarily locally and globally intertwined temporal and historical experience.

The 1911 Revolution has been called, by Communist historiographical convention, a “bourgeois” revolution. In the idiom of Marxian party dogma—where socialist revolutions must be preceded by bourgeois ones—the overthrow of the Qing dynasty serves the historicist purpose. It would be a mistake to adhere rigidly to such claims, however. Fitting the leaders, the ideology, or the politics of the revolution into a categorical straitjacket not only misconstrues the subordinated relationship between China and the capitalist world but places China into a teleological trajectory formed by histories made else-where.⁴ There is no doubt that China’s Republican Revolution was in part led and informed by a new class in formation—a scholar-bureaucrat fraction transforming itself into an intelligentsia with connections to urban, rural, military and commercial elites—but it is not evident that that means this class must be called a “bourgeoisie,” or that the revolution is most appropriately understood as a class-based, bourgeois affair.⁵ In a different idiom, the Republican Revolution has been claimed as a “Han-ethnic” revolution, where the Manchu-ness of the Qing is emphasized and the anti-Manchu nature of the revolutionaries becomes a paramount attribute. There were certainly a large number of adherents to revolutionary politics and activity of the time who construed the revolution in such mono-ethnic national terms. Sun Yatsen, for one, led a Japan-based Chinese revolutionary organization, the Tongmeng Hui (Revolutionary Alliance / ), formed in 1905, that explicitly espoused anti-Manchu sentiment and theorized the modern world of nations in ethnic terms. As cited in the epigraph to this chapter, a number of military songs mobilized troop support for the revolution in just this way. Indeed, it is an abiding curiosity of the Republican Revolution that its anti-imperialist/anti-colonial animus was aimed far more at the Manchus (construed as alien occupiers of China) than at the Euro-American or Japanese powers that were more recently settling into—and violently imposing themselves in—territorially conceded areas around the empire. By the same token, the relatively quick disappearance of mono-ethnicity in favor of a multiethnic flag and national-state rhetoric ought to give some pause over claims to too tight an enduring connection to Han-centrism on the part of most of the revolution’s political and intellectual leaders.

It has also been claimed—with far better evidence from the outcomes—that the Republican Revolution merely replaced one patriarchal state form with another, and that in this, its class or ethnic character is entirely beside the point. Given how very quickly the new leaders turned to suppress their erstwhile female comrades, and given how very anti-feminist many leaders of the early ROC proved to be, the securing of a patriarchal state—even while it reluctantly opened certain social, professional, educational, and other opportunities to women—seems to have far more basis in fact than any of the other claims. He-Yin Zhen, the anarcho-feminist cited at the opening of this chapter, saw this likelihood very clearly. The manifest continuity of patriarchy, however, masks the different ways in which that power operated in the new era: now, often by making common cause with socially progressive forces, some of which were led by women, patriarchal prerogative could partially conceal itself behind mildly feminist-seeming rhetoric and practice (the anti-footbinding movement and support for women’s education are two such examples).

What also is quite clear is that the Republican Revolution of 1911 was one among many global nationalist revolutions of the first decade of the twentieth century that elaborated, in weak or strong fashion, an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial motivation to spark a political if not also a social upheaval. Although the Chinese version of that anti-colonial rhetoric was bent at this time to the particular historical purpose of anti-Manchuism rather than anti-Euro-American imperialism, without a prior understanding of modern global anti-colonial and anti-imperialist theory and practice, this Chinese historical re-narrativization of the Manchus-as-modern-colonizers would not have been possible. The modernity of the Republican Revolution is in part located in this global temporal and spatial simultaneity. In the 1911 Revolution we thus see the definitive redefinition of the Chinese concept for “revolution” (geming / ) away from its previous containment to dynastic cycles—“severing” (ge / ) the (dynastic) “mandate” (ming / ) for the purpose of bestowing that mandate on a new dynasty—toward a modern global version connoting the fundamental transformation of political (if not also social) power from one form of polity to another—in this case, from dynastic empire to nation-state. At the same time, we also have, through this revolutionary process, a fundamental social redefinition of what constituted “politics” or the realm of the political, which now became an arena of potentially wide public contention rather than one contained wholly within the court/state. The social opening of the realm of politics was as consequential an outcome as any, as it was through this political rearticulation that China and the world were rethought, not separately but in necessary conjunction; and it was in this necessary conjunction that new classes came into political activity while global philosophies and practices of politics, society, economy, and culture became significant for and in China. It was, hence, when the relatively closed-circuit (though by now attenuated), intertwined Confucian logics of Chinese society, politics, economics, and culture crumbled that the social-ideological foundations of the dynasty collapsed and a new syncretic political possibility was established.

By the late nineteenth century, the accumulated domestic weaknesses of the Qing were sufficiently exacerbated by the increasing intrusions of Euro-American and Japanese capitalist-imperialism—as an economic imperative of competitive domination and internal social restructuring as well as an ideological temptation—to lead to a fundamental turn among the educated, who began to defect in ever-larger numbers from dynastic service and bureaucratic complacency. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 (also known as the Jiawu [] War), fought in and over Korea and the nature of its sovereignty and ties to China and Japan, accelerated this trend. The Qing was badly beaten by an opponent long thought to be culturally and historically inferior. Japan—past borrower of the Han Chinese writing system, faithful emulator of Confucianism, piratical “dwarves of the East” in popular Southern parlance—destroyed China’s new French-built navy before it even left harbor and humiliated Chinese troops on the Korean fields, where they met in face-to-face battle. Clearly, Japan had surged ahead, and, in stark comparison, the Qing seemed to have lagged behind. The Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the war was as punitive as any previously imposed upon the Qing by the Euro-American powers. Not only was Taiwan ceded to Japan, but the Qing was forced to pay for Japan’s side of the war in addition to acceding to other major concessions. The humiliation was deeply felt.

In 1898, a number of aggrieved scholars, led by the reformist Confucian Kang Youwei and his disciples, launched a petition to urge the Guangxu Emperor to reform Qing state practices and to embrace a more progressive historical stance. After one hundred days of hopeful and urgent activity, the movement was suppressed by the Empress Dowager Cixi, whose conservative advisors strongly counseled against all such destabilizing change. The emperor was placed under house arrest while Cixi, his adoptive mother, forcibly took over the regency and ruthlessly quashed any at court or elsewhere who might have supported Kang. Many of the most sought-after reformists escaped to Japan, enemy though it recently had been. Because Japan had new-style schools and political supporters of reform in Asia, as well as a written language still sufficiently close to Chinese, many stayed there, using it as a base from which to foment dissent against the Qing. Episodically pursued by Qing state agents abetted by Japanese police, the movement to fundamentally reform or oust the Qing nevertheless found a home in Japan.

The abandonment by a portion of the scholarly class of the tepid dynastically proposed solutions to China’s historical and contemporary problems proved to be one major impetus behind the Republican Revolution of 1911. The exiled thinkers and political activists in Japan and Hong Kong—who used the nascent forms of journalism and pamphleteering, and who were themselves not even all revolutionaries but rather also translators, writers, philosophers, and reforming Confucians—were joined by socially situated on-the-ground organizers of the Qing military, and of general social discontent, in shaping the Republican Revolution over the first decade of the twentieth century. Other social forces were marginally involved: for example, many merchant and commercial elites were sympathetic to the critique of the dynasty’s incompetence, and some even funded critical journals and publishing efforts that sponsored less dynasty-centric new forms of “universal history” (tongshi / ) and advocated for new forms of knowledge. Nevertheless, the revolution was carried out by a military coup backed by an intellectual rationale substantially developed in exile abroad.

The dynasty itself did plenty to hasten this outcome. Indeed, aside from the military defeat by Japan, the routing from the court of reformist tendencies not controlled immediately by Cixi and her henchmen, and the related pursuit of progressive scholars into exile, the dynasty sustained a mounting fiscal crisis, a consequent increasing indebtedness to foreign banks and Euro-American-Japanese imperialist interests, and a last-ditch attempt to align with social forces of a rather atavistic sort. All of this spelled doom for dynastic survival.

The Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 indicates the desperation and growing irrelevance of dynastic governance to the imagined future of China and the Chinese state. In the north-central province of Shandong—birthplace of Confucius—a roiling discontent was brewing among local peasants, who saw their village lands occupied by Christian missionaries working in cahoots with local elites whose personal coffers were amply filled in return for their assistance. Forming a secret society known as the “Harmonious Fists” (ordinarily translated as “Boxers”), these locals, in a fit of murderous frustration, killed two German missionaries and went on a looting and killing rampage against local officials and those they called “rice Christians” (Chinese who became Christians allegedly only in order to obtain food). Through the end of 1899 into 1900, drawing adherents to their side with their mystical beliefs in their own invulnerability to bullets and their pledges to recover control over local affairs, the Boxers began to move toward Beijing. The wrath of imperialist gunboat retaliation fell swiftly and surely in Shandong. Yet, the Boxers moved quickly, growing in size and intensity as they swept into the North. They managed to reach Beijing with hugely swollen numbers of the frustrated and the faithful. The dynasty, seeing an opportunity to oppose the despised practices of Euro-American gunboat diplomacy in defense of missionary intrusion, seized the day and proclaimed their alliance with the rebels. The Boxer disruption of railway lines connecting Beijing to other parts of the country frightened the foreign community in Beijing enough to prompt them to send urgent telegrams to their various leaders seeking immediate assistance.

The Boxers and Qing military banners lay siege to the Legation Quarters, where diplomats, missionaries, and mercenaries from all the nations resided in the capital. After some brief moments of rousing success in isolating the foreigners, by June 20, 1900, the forces of world order came crashing down. In one of the first examples of a global “coalition of the willing,” eight allied powers (Austro-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Russia) marched upon Beijing. Led by the US Marines (whose leader was memorably played by Charlton Heston in the 1963 Hollywood epic 55 Days at Peking), the Boxers and Manchu Banners were soundly defeated. By mid July a wholesale massacre of all suspected Boxer sympathizers was proceeding unimpeded upon a now-defenseless population. The Qing court, initially buoyed by popular rumors of Boxer success, was forced to abandon the capital, protected in its flight by the very foreign coalition then rampaging against Beijing’s population. Cixi and her retinue waited out the events in the North.

Most elites—scholars, commercial merchants, bureaucrats, landlords—were horrified at the court’s support for the Boxers. In part, this was pure class hatred: How could the court throw in its lot with this motley, anti-modern, anti-progressive, mystical, uneducated crew of violent peasants? In part, this was connected to the increasing alienation elites experienced with relation to the dynasty, which could no longer pretend to represent a desired future path, or even a tolerable present, for the Chinese state. In part, there also were growing alliances between these domestic classes and foreign commercial and cultural power. Provincial leaders refused to declare solidarity with the court; indeed, in certain Southern provinces—Guangdong or Hunan, for example—irredentist sentiment became a subject of serious debate in newspapers and journals. The massacres and consequent huge death toll in the wake of the Boxers, in addition to the extreme disruptions to transport, the economy, and social order occasioned by those fleeing the desperate remnants of the Boxers and the foreign pursuit, received little to no sympathy from elites safely out of range. The Boxer Protocol—the final punitive treaty imposed in 1901—was another devastating blow to the territorial sovereignty and fiscal capacities of the Qing court.⁶ From this point on, the dynasty attempted to promote a series of mild reform measures, intended to enhance the governing capacity of the state. These reforms closely mirrored those undertaken earlier by Japan. Yet, all this was too little, too late.

Sounding yet another death knell to the integration of knowledge and dynastic rule, in 1905 the civil service exam system that had secured the relation between education and appointment in the dynastic bureaucracy was abolished. The link between educated men, classical texts, and governing logics was severed. Some die-hard preservationists advocated the reconstitution of these connections in a cognate form; many more-progressive types proceeded to establish new schools to teach new knowledges, while yet others who would have taken the exams now found new forms of employment in book writing and publishing and/or in journalism. Meanwhile, political novels flourished, and translations from abroad of countless philosophies, world histories, biographies of great men (and a few women), scientific theories, and technological manuals were now sought after with huge enthusiasm by an urban reading public. New professional paths opened to educated men, and to a handful of educated women. The ideological and cultural sphere was invigorated and incredibly eclectic. Much of it contributed to the idea that the dynastic system was no longer a proper vessel or vehicle for the elaboration of a modern Chinese identity or polity in the twentieth-century world.

At the same time, social change was rampant as global and Chinese commodity markets became more integrated. Intensification of land use proceeded rapidly albeit unevenly, even as the handicraft production fueled by rural women’s labor increasingly lost out to imported or urban-made manufactured goods. More and more, women from rural areas—whose productivity had been crucial to the economic survival of their households and who were now rendered surplus labor—were forced or lured into new urban-based manufacturing concerns—silk filatures, cotton mills, match factories—owned and operated by Japanese or Euro-American capitalists, or, more rarely, by local industrialists; other women and girls were sold by destitute households as prostitutes, concubines, or serving girls for richer families. With stiff competition from Japan, Italy, France, and the United States manufacturing similar commodities, women’s wages were low, and they were easily preyed upon by gangs and other cohorts employed by bosses to keep them in the factories and obediently in line. Thus, as the rural economy deteriorated, there was an accelerating subordination of rural to urban space, helping to reorganize fundamentally the historical valence of social and spatial relations, even while many aspects of the outward appearance of continuity and stagnation remained.⁷

Widespread opium addiction—a problem that had begun to manifest in the early nineteenth century and that had rooted itself in practice up and down the urban and rural social ladders—facilitated international drug economies that were mercilessly exploitative, even while drug use and sale was outlawed domestically in Euro-America and Japan. These economies tied the Euro-American opium plantations and colonial states of South and Southeast Asia to China in close dependence. Colonial banks, whose capital funds were swollen and maintained in large part by opium revenue, controlled, to an ever-greater extent, the purse strings of the dynasty—even while powerful Chinese salt families, for example, started to transform their state-granted monopolies into dominance over other domestic economic spheres. These domestic concerns operated through the native Shanxi banking system that had for centuries facilitated inter-provincial trade through, among other modes, the verification of currency values (silver to copper valuation was one major issue, as copper was the currency in general use while silver was the currency of account). Yet, because colonial banks controlled the import and exchange value of silver, ultimately, financial affairs ended up running in and through that extraterritorially protected system. Throughout the late Qing period, in fact, the monetary situation became more and more muddled, as silver ingots, indifferently cast copper coin, paper currency, and other instruments of trade and exchange floated around the empire with varying, sometimes even arbitrary, degrees of value attached. There were times and places when opium served as the most stable medium of exchange. Only in the treaty ports, where currencies were strictly regulated by the colonial banks, was the monetary situation relatively clear.

Tied up with the weakening situation of Qing finances, the problem of railway construction flared into a major socioeconomic issue of the last decade of the dynasty. Initially undertaken by British, French, German, Russian, and Japanese companies granted territorial rights through treaty provisions extracted at gunpoint, railway construction was at first resisted by conservative Qing administrators (among other reasons, it was harmful to the dynastic-controlled system of horses and postal relays). After 1895, railways were understood to be both central to and significant for military, commercial, and governing purposes. In the face of exhortations by provincial leaders, who saw railway revenues sucked up by foreign concerns, the Qing began, in 1904 and 1905, to lend large sums to Chinese companies for the construction of trunk lines, several of which were built. However, these were not really economically viable, and by 1911 the indigenous lines had fallen into bankruptcy. The Qing proceeded to nationalize and then pledge them to foreign banks as collateral for loans. The discontent among merchant and commercial elites and their resulting restiveness directly contributed to the abandonment of the dynasty during the revolutionary events of October 1911.

Efforts at modernization—of institutions, of communication and commercial networks, of industry—went under the rubric of “wealth and power” (fuqiang / ). Through the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, indifferent to labor and the socially disruptive impact of their various schemes, urban-based commercial and merchant elites operating under these initiatives grew in social power and even in cultural prestige. Landowners, the historical gentry and acknowledged dominant class of Confucian dynastic China, held onto their economic and social positions increasingly by making alliances with, marrying their footbound daughters into, or sending sons to engage in the previously despised spheres of trade and commerce. Theorizations of these and other developments became part of a budding disciplinary transformation in knowledge production, some of which tried to reconcile social changes with re-interpretations of Confucian texts, while others ditched those texts altogether to take up modern theories of state and economy emanating from Japan, Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States. Scholar and publisher Yan Fu translated Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin; Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei’s student, introduced Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (a now-obscure German statist political theorist and jurist), and Friedrich List (a German theorist of national economics); others made available in Chinese the rudiments of socialism, anarchism, Russian utopianism, and feminism, for example. Theories of “survival of the fittest” jostled with natural rights theory, which competed with liberal and anti-liberal statist positions, juxtaposed to modernist and anti-modernist anti-statism—some of which, in turn, was funneled into revolutionary and nonrevolutionary nationalist thought. The lines of debate were rarely clear—other than as marked between pro- and anti-revolutionaries—and the cauldron of thought was constantly stirred in the heated journalistic mediasphere of the day.

Sun Yatsen, not fully trained in Confucian texts or hampered by previous loyalties to one or another school of classical or foreign thinking, promoted in outline what he called the “Three Principles of the People” (sanmin zhuyi / ). A mild form of socialism intended to forestall the violence potentially produced by capitalist class division, Sun’s Three Principles were aimed at helping realize the ideals of republican equality and democracy. Beginning from the principle of land redistribution (derived, eclectically, from the American agrarian reformer Henry George), Sun attempted to theorize and map out how, in a post-dynastic world, Chinese were to be made economically productive, politically democratic, and globally sovereign. Often understood to be the better road not taken in China, the Three Principles continued to be fleshed out from the 1910s onward and have remained a touchstone of Chinese political and economic thinking. They were ostensibly embraced by republican revolutionaries and their successors throughout the century, even as the Three Principles increasingly became more incantatory than real as goals of state practice. Nevertheless, the eclecticism of their political and theoretical sources demonstrates well the range of thinking that informed the revolutionary endeavors of the anti-dynastic republicans in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was this eclecticism that helped delineate the parameters and inevitability of Qing ideological collapse.

Among the first decrees of Sun’s government in January 1912, men were enjoined to cut their queues, the pigtails symbolizing fealty to the Manchu Qing Dynasty that they had been forced to wear for 268 years. In the first years of the new republic, most Han men complied, keeping barbers busy all over the empire. (Men in Mongolia, Tibet, Turkestan, and other peripheral regions held out longer, perhaps leery of the durability of the new order.) In more than mere sartorial terms, queue-cutting marked a definitive end to Qing claims to ruling legitimacy. A new national flag was promoted, in which a five-ethnicity unity (Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, Muslim) was proclaimed as a national state ideal, while a parliament was formed, extending voting rights to property-owning Han men. Women, who had fought the Qing in large numbers, had been promised full citizenship and a place at the political table; they were summarily booted from parliamentary proceedings. A particularly prominent appearance in the halls of power sealed the deal: as Song Jiaoren (Sun’s deputy) was finalizing the terms of the republican constitutional charter in Beijing, Tang Qunying and two other women marched into the hall and slapped him with their fans in reproach for his/Sun’s bargaining away of women’s rights in exchange for conservative support. The betrayal of the promise of “equality and democracy” had, it turned out, been all but instantaneous.⁸