Season 14, Episode 2: The Fall of the Qing Dynasty
Many of the events which we will discuss in this episode technically took place during the Meiji Period, but for the sake of their own historical continuity I decided to cover them during this season instead. The closing years of the Qing Dynasty were so politically chaotic that it seems likely that most Japanese people wouldn’t have fully comprehended the meaning of events in China throughout the first decade of the 1900s until the Qing Dynasty itself came to an end in 1912. It would have probably seemed like more chaos in China, business as usual.
The Qing Dynasty was in sorry shape after the Boxer Rebellion and the intervention of the Eight-Nation Alliance. The invasion had resulted in more predatory leases granted to European colonial powers and a further descent of the Qing Dynasty in China’s public eye. The Boxer Rebellion had, famously, been largely prosecuted by Chinese peasants and commoners who rallied to the defense of the rightful rulers of the middle kingdom. When the Qing Dynasty instead succumbed to foreign intervention, however, many of those peasants felt betrayed by the very rulers they had fought, bled, and sacrificed comrades to defend. However, there were some Chinese patriots who had soured on the Qing Dynasty many years before and now saw an opportunity in the dynasty’s sharp dive in public approval.
In 1888, four like-minded young men from China attending the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese became a close-knit group of friends. They were united by a desire to see China become a modern state capable of defending itself from imperial aggression and they frequently discussed with one another how such a transformation might take place. Generally all four agreed that overthrowing the Qing Dynasty was a necessary first step in such a process. They were known as The Four Bandits, which is admittedly a pretty cool name for a group of friends.
As the First Sino-Japanese War began in 1894, one of the Four Bandits named Sun Yat-sen founded the Xīngzhōnghuì, or “Society for Reviving China,” in Honolulu, where he was living in exile among other Chinese expatriates. The stated goals of the Xīngzhōnghuì were to “overthrow the Manchus, restore Han principles of governance, and establish a unified government.” These objectives were roughly in sync with Sun Yat-sen’s political philosophy of “Sanmin Zhuyi,” or “Three Principles of the People,” which essentially boiled down to “nationalism, democracy, and social welfare.”
Sun Yat-sen traveled the world throughout the closing years of the 1800s and throughout the 19-aughts, establishing charter organizations of Xīngzhōnghuì in various cities in Europe, the United States, Africa, and in other parts of East Asia. Wherever there were significant numbers of expatriate Chinese laborers, Sun Yat-sen and his peers would attempt to establish their nationalist organization among them.
After the disastrous First Sino-Japanese war and the even more disastrous Boxer Rebellion, the Qing government decided to make yet another attempt at large-scale reform that would transform their dynastic government into a modern nation state. Called “The Late Qing Reforms,” these proposed changes were far more radical than the previous “Self-strengthening reforms.” In 1901 the Qing government established a new bureau called “The Administration Office,” which was tasked with bringing about the modernizing reforms which China so desperately needed. The leaders of this office submitted a broad 3-point plan which proposed the following: determine the direction of the reforms, learn everything possible from Japan, and transition from an imperial government into a constitutional monarchy.
Throughout the 19-aughts, Chinese ministers would be sent abroad to learn from other nations while the government determined the direction of their intended reforms. One particular group visited the United States and even enjoyed an audience with then-president Theodore Roosevelt. They returned to China and gave a report which included their own recommendation that China needed a constitution -- that the primary means of power in the strongest nations on the planet was their constitutions and the separation of powers contained therein.
The Qing Dynasty had already announced their intention to implement a constitution but in 1906, after receiving favorable reports from their overseas agents, they declared a period of “Preparatory Constitutionalism,” in which reforms would continue while the government drafted a permanent constitution which would become the capstone of China’s modernization.
Meanwhile, in 1904 the Guangfuhui, or “Restoration Society,” was founded along similar lines to the Xīngzhōnghuì. The Restoration Society was a secret society dedicated to bringing down the Qing Dynasty through revolution and in 1905 it was merged with Sun Yat-sen’s Xīngzhōnghuì into a new organization called Tongmenghui, which means “United Allegiance Society.” Tongmenghui also merged with several other revolutionary groups and became the flagship organization of anti-Qing revolution. From late 1906 to the spring of 1908, several small-scale rebellions erupted within China which had been sponsored by Tongmenghui, but all were crushed by the Qing military, which had become even more capable thanks to military reforms.
You may recall last season that we discussed the new-and-improved Qing military groups which were named Beiyang - the Beiyang Army and Beiyang Navy specifically. However, both of these groups were defeated repeatedly throughout the First Sino-Japanese War and it was clear to both outside and inside observers that the reforms which had created these new military units were insufficient. To help transform the Beiyang Army into a modern fighting force, the Qing Dynasty turned to Yuan Shikai, a capable Han general and longtime Qing loyalist who took to his new task with gusto.
Yuan Shikai, unlike many of his peers, took measures to ensure that the initially-experimental army placed under his command had good reason to be loyal to him. He not only ensured that they were paid regularly but also ensured that they were paid on time. His later actions would mean that his activities throughout the late 1800s and early 19-aughts would always be cast in a suspect light, though I believe he maintained true loyalty to the Qing Dynasty initially and throughout most of the first decade of the twentieth century.
Throughout the 19-aughts, however, the Qing court was still plagued by the usual background interference of plotting, counter-plotting, and court intrigue. Emperor Guangxu had been under virtual house arrest since 1898 and Dowager Empress Cixi continued in her role as the practical chief executive. The Dowager Empress, who had overseen the reform efforts, was determined to keep control of the state out of the emperor’s hands and she may have even resorted to drastic measures in that quest.
Here’s what we know: on November 14, 1908, at the age of 37, Emperor Guangxu complained of stomach pain, his face turned blue, and he died. Poisoning was immediately suspected and the court was swift to release the late emperor’s medical records, which indicated chronic issues with stomach problems, and claimed that the sovereign had died of natural causes. However, a face that turns blue accompanied by stomach pain are symptoms which are consistent with arsenic poisoning. In 2008, the emperor’s remains were examined and it was revealed that his body possessed a level of arsenic which was so high that poisoning by overdose was the only logical conclusion. We can say with a fairly high level of certainty that Emperor Guangxu was assassinated with poison. What cannot be known, short of discovering an authentic unedited diary from the time, is who killed him and why.
Dowager Empress Cixi is generally considered the leading suspect. By 1908, she was suffering from chronic illness consistent with her age (she was 72 years old by this point) and she herself died the day after Emperor Guangxu’s untimely departure. It’s often theorized that she feared the sovereign would undo the reforms she had put in place and thereby plunge what remained of their nation into certain ruin. Yuan Shikai is also high on the list of suspects. He was a close ally of the Dowager and may have worried that a restoration of the sovereign would result in his own execution for treason. For now, and likely forever, the assassination of Emperor Guangxu remains a mystery.
In the final hours of her life, Dowager Empress Cixi had remained politically active. Upon hearing of the emperor’s death, she quickly named the two-year-old Puyi, the nephew of the late emperor whose father was Prince Chun, as the rightful successor. Her readiness to put a successor in place has only fueled historical speculation that she was behind the late emperor’s murder but again, we can’t be certain. Prince Chun was made regent for the child emperor and his adopted mother, the new Dowager Empress Longyu, also stepped into a leadership role as the reforms continued.
Meanwhile, Tongmenghui was facing challenges of its own. The various uprisings they had spurred throughout the 19-aughts had accomplished nothing but casualties and some of the rank-and-file members were growing dissatisfied with the group’s leadership and general direction. Sun Yat-sen and his fellow revolutionaries relocated their headquarters from Singapore to the Malaysian state of Penang, where they would host the 1910 Penang Conference. The objective of this conference was to raise money and materiel for a new uprising centered on the Guangzhou Region in China.
In April of 1911, the Second Guangzhou Uprising began. The First Guangzhou Uprising had been launched in 1895 just after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War but had ended in failure. The revolutionaries preparing for battle in Guangzhou in 1911 had better luck, at least initially. The group, which probably numbered around one hundred twenty, successfully surprised the Qing forces guarding the residence of the Viceroy who governed Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces. They seized control of the residence and drove the Qing military from the town. However, Qing reinforcements soon arrived and laid siege to the residence, eventually killing most of the revolutionaries, though some managed to slip away. Eighty-six total were killed but only seventy-two could be identified. Many had farewell letters to their loved ones in their pockets. They were buried in a mass grave which was later called the Yellow Flower Mound, which is why the Second Guangzhou Uprising is also called the Yellow Flower Mound Uprising.
Tongmenghui had just suffered another high-profile failure in its repeated attempts to spark a nation-wide rebellion against Qing rule. However, the failures of Tongmenghui did not necessarily signify any great success on the part of the Qing government. In spite of its attempts at modernizing reforms and promises of a constitution, the Chinese government in 1911 was still in bad shape. Before we discuss their final collapse, we should discuss the activities of Yuan Shikai, who, like Sun Yat-sen, had suffered political setbacks of his own.
Yuan Shikai had risen through the ranks of the Qing government through military service after failing to pass the civil service examination twice in the 1870s. However, whatever he lacked in proper Confucian memorization he more than made up for with practical sensibility, both on and off the battlefield. He had taken command of Korea’s army and was credited with preventing the success of the Gapsin Coup, an event we discussed last season in which pro-Japanese Korean ministers attempted to take over the government in 1884.
His political savvy was partly due to his ability to recognize a likely winner and back them early, as he had done for Dowager Empress Cixi, but he was also very clever in his manner of leadership and often inspired devotion in those he commanded. His reputation as a beloved commander was so strong that the US Secretary of State tried to convince Shikai to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and seize power for himself after the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War. At that time, Yuan Shikai politely refused to consider the proposition.
In 1906, following orders for reform which came down from the Dowager, Yuan Shikai played a key role in dismantling the civil service exam. I imagine he may have relished the task, given his former failure to pass the exam himself. To replace the exam, and indeed the entire nationwide system of Confucian education, Shikai and his fellow ministers established western-style universities which were also in direct imitation of Meiji Japan.
After Emperor Guangxu was murdered in 1908, his will contained strict instructions that Yuan Shikai should be executed. This was ignored, for the moment, though elements within the Qing Court were openly hostile to the general. Shortly after the two-year-old Puyi was made emperor and his father made regent, Yuan Shikai was relieved of his command and essentially placed in exile. Publicly, he claimed that he was returning to his home village to convalesce while suffering from a foot problem. This helped him save face, but if his opponents in the government hoped he would retire from politics permanently, they were in for a rude surprise.
During his time in exile, Yuan Shikai kept regular correspondence with political allies still in the regent’s good graces and with the officers in his New Army. This military unit, the best-equipped and trained among all the Chinese armies, was loyal to Yuan Shikai regardless of whether he was in favor at court or not. This loyalty would come in handy for Yuan Shikai in just a few years.
Meanwhile, the Late Qing Reforms continued. In 1909, China held its first-ever parliamentary elections. The specific name for China’s parliament was “The Advisory Council” which, as its name suggests, was not so much a lawmaking body as it was… well… an advisory council. Provinces held elections that same year. The electorate itself was somewhat similar, demographically at least, to the electorate of Meiji Japan. Men older than 25 who could claim over 5,000 yuan of wealth were among the eligible voters and candidates, but men who had obtained a certain level of education were also allowed to run for office or vote in the elections. Men who did not meet either of these qualifications or who had disreputable relatives or criminal histories were, along with women at large, barred from voting and candidacy. All told, the electorate was around two million men, which amounted to less than one percent of the total population, which was likely between four hundred forty and four hundred fifty million people.
The constitutionist parties obtained a majority in the advisory council elections, winning one hundred sixteen of the two hundred available seats. However, the Qing Dynasty’s transformation into a constitutional republic was overshadowed by lingering issues of inequality and discontent. The government was, for one thing, massively in debt because of the Boxer Protocol, the agreement which they had ratified at the close of the Boxer Rebellion which included a massive war indemnity whose installments they were still paying.
To ease their financial difficulties, the Qing Dynasty had resorted to taking loans from foreign powers to keep their books balanced. At the end of the day, this amounted to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, if you’ll forgive the expression, and was really just digging them deeper into debt. The government believed that it had one particularly powerful card left to play, however, which they hoped would be strong enough to relieve them of foreign debt forever. The plan was to nationalize all railway systems across China and then sell the rights to operate, improve, and expand that system to the British.
There was only one thing standing in the way of the Qing government’s plan: the rightful owners of the various railways that criss-crossed the nation. Most railway projects had been financed and built by local municipalities or provincial governments. The Qing government was often impatient with the slow progress of the construction of these rail lines and probably thought that national seizure would improve efficiency and ensure that long-stalled projects were completed in a more timely manner. As in most cases of eminent domain, compensation was offered to the relevant authorities. However, rather than paying with actual silver, the Qing government offered bonds.
Many of the provincial governments had not been able to afford financing these railway projects with tax revenue alone and had turned to private financiers who expected large returns and profit shares. They weren’t satisfied with government bonds, especially from a government which many of them no longer trusted. Said government also grossly undervalued the projects in question and their offered bond-based payouts were, to the private financiers, unacceptable. Southern China especially was incensed by these proceedings and reacted in the late summer of 1911. In mid-August, mass protests with tens of thousands of participants took to the streets of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. Strikes, boycotts, and other mass actions ensued and by early September the authorities worried that Sichuan might actually erupt into open rebellion.
Just a few months before, the Qing government had assembled its first ever cabinet, led by first-ever prime minister Prince Yikuang. While this was meant to be yet another step in the direction of constitutional monarchy, the sitting parliament erupted with displeasure at the cabinet’s members. This cabinet had not been selected from parliamentarians nor any other elected group, but had been appointed in the emperor’s name by his father, the regent Prince Chun. So many ministers in this cabinet were members of the imperial family that it was derided as the Imperial Family Cabinet.
The already unpopular cabinet faced a real crisis in the face of what came to be called the “Railway Protection Movement” which continued to gain momentum in early September in Chengdu. The governor-general of Sichuan took steps to quell the unrest by arresting the movement’s ringleaders. Protestors responded by marching on his residence and demanding the release of their leaders. The governor-general responded by ordering his troops to fire on the protestors. When the gunsmoke had cleared, thirty-two people were dead.
The death of thirty-two of their comrades only further cemented the protestors’ resolve. Likewise, in spite of the Sichuan governor’s attempts at keeping things under wraps, revolutionaries who had been waiting for an opportunity to rise up decided that their moment had come. They marched on Chengdu en masse but they were forced to settle for a siege when a contingent of New Army soldiers within the city deployed artillery to defend the city. The revolution now began in earnest, and Qing loyalist troops were redeployed from central China to the tumultuous south.
By November, things had gotten bad enough for the Qing government that prime minister Prince Yikuang was dismissed and his cabinet dissolved. In his place, the government called upon an old loyalist whom they hoped would crush this rebellion and restore the harmony of the empire: Yuan Shikai. His first order of business was to request that the regent, Prince Chun, withdraw from political life, which resulted in the prince’s resignation. The Dowager Empress Longyu showered him with titles, hoping to paper over the exile in which Shikai had lived for the past few years. Now that he had a relatively free hand to direct the course of state, he assembled a cabinet composed of nearly all Han ministers, appointing only one Manchu minister.
By this point, the rebellion had spread to Hubei Province in central China, which was far too close to the national capital of Beijing for comfort. In the capital of Hubei, in the district of Wuchang specifically, a rebellion had erupted which was supported by defecting members of the New Army, making it especially threatening if not contained. Throughout most of the end of 1911, Yuan Shikai was busy retaking rebel territory in Hubei, which ultimately culminated in the battle of Yangxia.
The fighting was extremely terrible as the tactics and strategies employed were similar to those which would soon emerge in Europe during the first World War. The rapid fire of machine guns, the boom of artillery, the shrieks of the wounded all filled the air as both sides sought advantage in the midst of what seemed to soldiers on the ground like chaos. Yuan Shikai’s army was victorious, pushing the rebels back into Wuchang by the close of 1911. However, by this point Sichuan Province and many of its neighbors had declared independence and would likewise require reconquest in the years to come. Calling themselves “The Republic of China,” they had elected Sun Yat-sen as their first president.
The practical question, for Yuan Shikai, was how to preserve the relatively high position he had managed to obtain. His former ascendancy had been unceremoniously cut short by ungrateful Manchu overlords and he had no intention of letting something like that happen again. If he prosecuted this rebellion to its full extent, and won, he would no longer be of use to the Qing Dynasty. He suspected, reasonably, that he would soon afterward find himself once again confined to exile… or worse.
Instead of walking down a doomed path, Yuan Shikai reached out to representatives of the rebellion and offered a short-term ceasefire, which he proceeded to extend as he negotiated a rather unorthodox peace agreement. Coordinating with Sun Yat-sen and the other leaders of the revolution, they worked out a deal. Yuan Shikai was tasked with securing the emperor’s abdication. In exchange, Yuan Shikai himself would serve as president of the newly-founded Republic of China going forward. He agreed to this and in February of 1912, just a few months after the extended ceasefire began, he convinced Dowager Empress Longyu to announce the 4-year-old emperor’s abdication and to transfer all authority of the Qing Dynasty to the newly-created Republic of China. After more than three thousand, five hundred years, Imperial Dynastic rule in China had officially come to an end. At least, for the moment.
Next time, we will discuss the early years of the Republic of China and its relationship to Japan and the other great powers of the world.