Chinese: ‘a China in arms will be a big power at
some future day’, he wrote; the Western powers
should make sure that ‘the China of the future
might have something to thank us for and not to
avenge’. There were some Chinese reformers who
sensed that China stood at the parting of the
ways. China could emulate Japan or suffer the fate
of India and south-east Asia, then part of the
colonial empires of the Dutch, the British and the
French.
Many of these reformers had received part of
their education in Japan or the West. Yan Fu, one
of the most important, spent time not only in
Japan but also in England. In his writings he con-
trasted the Chinese ideals of harmony and stability
with Western encouragement of the thrusting indi-
vidual, competition and the goal of progress. Yan
Fu translated into Chinese seminal Western works
on politics and the economy, books by T. H.
Huxley, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith among
them. His translations and his own advocacy stim-
ulated demands for a break with Confucian tradi-
tions and the adoption of a Western-style form of
constitutional government. Another reformer of
great influence in the first decade of the twentieth
century was Liang Qichao, the intellectual leader
of the young Chinese progressives, who wrote
extensively about Western political leaders and
thinkers in the hope of opening up a new world
to the Chinese and thus transforming them into
a new people. In its last years, not so much dir-
ectly influenced by the reformers but reacting to
the same stimuli – a desire to strengthen China
against the foreigner – the Ch’ing dynasty pro-
mulgated reforms thick and fast, promising the
gradual introduction of constitutional government,
a process which when set in motion was to lead
to its own downfall and the revolution of 1911.
Thousands of students in the first decade of the
twentieth century travelled and studied abroad.
Their ideas were far more radical than those of the
reformers. Their goal was a revolution against
the ‘foreign’ Ch’ing dynasty and the establish-
ment of a republic. They identified with another
Western-educated revolutionary, Dr Sun Yat-sen.
A farmer’s son, like many Chinese he had emi-
grated abroad joining, at the age of twelve, his
brothers in Hawaii. He was educated in a British
missionary school there and, later, in Hong Kong,
where he graduated in medicine. He did not
practise long as a doctor, instead seeing that his
task was to awaken China to revolution. In breach
of Chinese tradition, Sun Yat-sen encouraged
the Chinese to view themselves as a distinctive
race. The removal of the foreign Manchu Ch’ing
dynasty provided a focus for the revolutionary
movement. Sun Yat-sen wished to create a
modern Chinese nation state, with a constitution
based on that of the US together with some
Chinese traditions grafted on to it such as a
control branch of government – the old censors
under a new name. In Japan he founded the rev-
olutionary League of Common Alliance, an organ-
ised political movement which in 1912 joined
with other groups to form the Kuomintang or
Nationalist Party. Not until after his death in
1925, however, did the Kuomintang play a
leading role in China’s history.
Sun Yat-sen summed up his political pro-
gramme and aims in three principles: first, the
restoration of the Chinese identity, which came
to mean the removal of both the ‘foreign’
Manchu dynasty and foreign imperialism. China,
Sun Yat-sen said, lacked a national spirit; the 400
million people of China were ‘just a heap of loose
sand’, and China the weakest and poorest nation
- ‘other men are the carving knife and serving
dish; we are the fish and meat’. China must seek
its salvation by espousing nationalism and so avert
the catastrophe of ‘China being lost and our
people being eliminated’. The foreign oppression,
he pointed out, was not just political, which was
easily recognised, but economic, transforming
China ‘into a colony of the foreign powers’. The
second principle was democracy, by which he
meant the creation of a strong executive central
power and the ultimate sovereignty of the people
expressed in an electoral process. The third prin-
ciple, socialism, was the vaguest; in theory it
stood for landownership equalisation and some
state control to prevent the abuse of monopoly
capitalist power, but since the Kuomintang drew
support from businessmen, the principle was
blurred. Sun Yat-sen developed these ideas
throughout his political life, though in his own
lifetime they found little application.
1
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