The advocates of Westernisation always faced
one serious emotional and intellectual problem.
The very people they wished to emulate showed
their belief in Chinese inferiority. Foreign resi-
dents, whether missionaries or merchants, only
too frequently looked down on the Chinese,
regarding their culture as pagan. The roles of the
civilised and the barbarians were reversed. In
Shanghai there were parks reserved exclusively for
the Westerners, characteristic of the racial preju-
dice of the time. The Christian missionaries saw
themselves engaged in saving souls otherwise lost
to heathen ways. So the Chinese reacted to
Western ways with both admiration and intense
hostility. The political and economic behaviour of
the Western powers could only strengthen that
hostility.
The course of the revolution of 1911, which
soon ended the monarchy, was not determined by
Sun Yat-sen, though a Chinese Republic did come
into being. A strong Chinese nation dedicated to
the objectives of his loose Alliance movement did
not emerge when the revolution had succeeded in
its first task of overthrowing the Manchus. The
membership of Sun Yat-sen’s party amounted to
only a few thousand within China. More signifi-
cant in determining the subsequent course of
events were the men of influence in the provinces
- the merchants and the gentry – who took advan-
tage of constitutional reform to assert the inde-
pendence of the provinces in the newly elected
assemblies. The spark for starting the revolution
was provided by a rising of a small group of revo-
lutionary soldiers in Wuchang in central China in
October 1911 with only the weakest links with
Sun Yat-sen’s Alliance. Sun Yat-sen at the time
was in Denver in the US. The rising could easily
have been suppressed. But so weak had the power
of the central government become that province
after province in October and November 1911
declared its independence from the central court
government. Hostility to the dynasty was wide-
spread. The court turned to Yuan Shikai, recently
a governor-general of a northern province, where
he had built up a modern Chinese Northern
Army.
Yuan Shikai was in retirement when the revo-
lution broke out; the dynasty saw him now as the
only man considered capable of commanding the
loyalty of the officers of the Northern Army,
whose military strength might still re-establish the
dynasty’s authority. Yuan Shikai, however, was
determined to be his own master. He negotiated
with the revolutionaries. They agreed to his
assuming the presidency of the Chinese Republic
provided he could secure the abdication of the
Ch’ing dynasty. In February 1912 the abdication
decree was published and in March 1912 Yuan
Shikai became the first president of China as the
man most acceptable to the provincial gentry and
merchants. These men were basically conserva-
tive, and Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary movement
was abhorrent to them. There was to be no social
revolution. The republic and its new parliament
representing the unity of China were frail institu-
tions. During the last four years of Yuan Shikai’s
life, from 1912 to 1916, he ruled more and more
as a military dictator through the army and,
shortly before his death, attempted to revive the
monarchy with himself as emperor. Through his
hold over the army, the provinces were unable to
assert complete independence from Peking. But
Yuan Shikai could establish no genuine national
unity and with his death the disintegration of
China accelerated.The years from 1906 to 1928 mark the warlord
era in modern Chinese history. To the outside
world the Republic of China was governed from
Peking. In reality this was just one of the hundreds
of governments, each headed by a warlord with a
personal army which had gained control of an area
sometimes small, sometimes covering a whole
province. The warlords intrigued and fought each
other in constant wars throughout twelve years of
strife and bloodshed. The peasants suffered from
pillage, tax oppression, destruction of their prop-
erty and bloodshed. But during this bleak period
a continuous process of state-building also took
place.
This same period saw some other positive
developments. The combination of China’s mis-
fortunes internal and external welded together a
new national movement which tried to recapture
the objectives set by Sun Yat-sen but totally
disregarded after the revolution of 1911.