An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China by David Strand (review)

In 1912, writes David Strand, Chinese women's public aspirations, one measure of political participation in the global twentieth century, were threatened by both political and social influences. In newly republican Beijing, for example, women could join one (or more) of China's 85 political parties (p. 149) but were not permitted to visit teahouses or to watch opera performances alongside men. This discordance could have provided a foundation for politicians eager to capitalize on an underserved constituency. Such politicians might have included those aligned with the Nationalist Party, formed in August 1912 in the capital city's Huguang Lodge by a merger of Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Alliance and four conservative parties.

In Strand's view, unfortunately for both China and Chinese women, the Nationalists' founder Song Jiaoren and their revolutionary godfather Sun sacrificed the Revolutionary Alliance's long-standing plank of male-female equality, along with other principles, to make common cause with its four partners. A fifth party, the Republicans, rejected the merger and turned to the Beiyang Republic's strongman president, Yuan Shikai. Out of these and other compromises emerged the Nationalists' parliamentary coalition that sought to contest power with Yuan and his Republicans in a modern, electoral way.

In the 1912-13 winter elections, only one in five Chinese males, or about 10 percent of the population, cast ballots; women would not get the vote until 1947. Less than a year after Song Jiaoren traded away women's political rights in his quest for power, Song was dead, victim of a shooting in Shanghai that many traced to Yuan. Yuan, still ruling China, blamed a mysterious "Female Assassination Group," possibly hoping to finger those Song had silenced a year before. Sun, having already compromised with Yuan, remained at work as Yuan's railway minister. Two years later, in 1915, Yuan duplicitously declared himself the Hongxian ("Grand Constitutional Achievement") Emperor; within a year, Yuan too was dead. Thereafter, military men formerly in Yuan's thrall took turns leading the feeble Republic. Recognized by the foreign powers (Sun acerbically commented that although the republicans were no longer slaves to the Manchus, the republic itself was now slave to the more than ten foreign imperialist powers who bankrolled its warlords [p. 8]), the Republic carried on until it was subsumed by the reorganized Nationalist party-state in 1927. By then, electoral politics of a recognizable kind were long gone.

Against this 15-year backdrop of compromise, opportunism, and outright criminality, is it any wonder that contemporaries (Liang Qichao, p. 22; Lu Xun, pp. 56-61), near-contemporaries (Nie Qijie, p. 81), and historians (Li Jiannong, p. 3, n. 2) have collectively questioned the legitimacy of the early Chinese Republic? Strand boldly revisits that republic in this book, which concentrates on the period from 1911 to 1916 but whose narrative continues past Sun's death in 1925 to 1927 (and, rhetorically, even into the post-Tiananmen China of the 1990s). Strand argues, vigorously and often plausibly, that "Republican China was republican" (p. 3) in behavior and expectations even when observers dismissed it as a "signboard republic" (p. 1), a "rhetorical state" (p. 78), or one in which "political organizations like parties, clubs, and societies floated 'like duckweed' on the surface of politics" (p. 3).

Drawing on wide-ranging assessments of the Republic culled from published primary and secondary sources, and influenced by Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's arguments about parallels between China's modern political language and theatrical performance (the Huguang Lodge contained a theatre and is today an opera house), Strand eavesdrops on Beiyangera Chinese oratory.² That practice drew both on Fukuzawa Yukichi's loanword to identify itself (enzetsu/yanshuo) and on China's own story-telling tradition (pp. 76-77) to create a vital device for political mobilization. By the mid-1920s, although the Nationalists as well as the early Chinese Communists came to favor top-down control...