China: Understanding Its Past

5. Reform and Revolution, 1890–1920

“Self-Strengthening” At first, reformers thought it was most important to adapt to non-Chinese military ways. This was the easiest change to make because the Chinese had already seen the power of English gunboats during the Opium War. The Chinese also understood conquest by military might. The Qing emperors were, in fact, Manchurians who Reform and Revolution, 1890–1920 5 Section B y the 1890s the failings of the Qing dynasty had become blatant. Some leaders, seeing that changes had to come, favored reform, even initiating some reforms in the late 1890s and the early 1900s. But others simply did not believe that reform could come from within; they advocated tearing down the old system and starting over. This section focuses on these two kinds of change in China: reform and revolution. It examines the life and ideas of the man called “the father of the Chinese republic,” Sun Yat-sen. We will study his short term as president of the Republic of China and look at the beginnings of Chinese nationalism as embodied in what came to be called the May Fourth Movement. As foreign military strength exposed the weaknesses of the Middle Kingdom during the late nineteenth century, it became clear that the Chinese had to act or they would be forced to accede to every demand the foreigners made. The Chinese understood that change was needed , but they resisted change and disagreed about what needed changing and how much. What eventually happened was that change or reform came in stages, each of which failed. After each failure, there was a period of re-evaluation before further reforms were tried. Increasingly radical solutions to China’s problems were proposed and eventually attempted, so stability did not come for a long time. In fact, some argue that China has still not really stabilized today, well over a hundred years after would-be reformers first grasped that it must adapt to the modern world. had invaded and subjugated the Han Chinese. The “self-strengthening movement” began in the 1860s. It was led by provincial officials who were loyal to the throne but had independent power bases and thought the key to the restoration of China was to adopt Western military technology . Over the next thirty years they made sporadic attempts to incorporate Western weapons into the Chinese military, and China started to manufacture its own materials for weapons, ships, and rail transport. The self-strengthening movement was sharply criticized after military defeats by France in the 1880s. It was clear that China was still no match for European firepower. But the need for further reform was not really recognized until China suffered a far more humiliating defeat at the hands of its one-time tributary state, Japan, when China lost the Sino–Japanese War in 1895. This loss shook Chinese technical and intellectual society to the core. It was one thing to lose to a Western power with a long history of guns and firepower; it was another to lose to a former tributary state that had started its own modernization program only thirty years earlier. Japan quickly became a model for Chinese reformers. If we must reform, they said, perhaps the Japanese way can work for us. Into this atmosReading : Political Reform During the Late Qing Dynasty Section 5: Reform and Revolution, 1890–1920 139 phere came several important reformers. The best known was Kang Youwei, who advocated not only military reform but also changes in the educational system, the adoption of modern techniques in agriculture, transportation, and communication, and the reform of the official system. Some of his ideas were original; some were based on Japanese reforms. The Hundred Days Reform By 1898, three years after the defeat by Japan, the situation in China had deteriorated so badly that Kang Youwei was able to persuade the emperor to introduce a series of radical reforms. The The Nanjing Arsenal was established in 1867 as one of China’s many selfstrengthening projects. Photo circa 1868 by John Thompson. Courtesy of the Military Museum of China, Beijing, People’s Republic of China. (far left) Kang Youwei (1858–1927), Confucian scholar and leader of the Reform Movement of 1898 and a constitutional reformist. He later became a fierce critic of Sun Yat-sen and advocated the restoration of the Manchus. (left) Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a student of Kang Youwei and a leader of the Reform Movement of 1898. He advocated that China become a constitutional monarchy. Courtesy of the Historical...