When a political movement manages to overthrow a system of government that had lasted, with interruptions, for over two millennia—killing it so dead that a few feeble attempts to restore it failed quickly and utterly—such a movement would not seem to deserve the label of failure or, at best, precursor to something bigger and better. Yet such has been the fate of the 1911 Revolution.
Xiaowei Zheng begins her study of the revolution by pointing out that in its wake, while modern Chinese governments have acted in the name of the people, they have been neither republican nor constitutionalist in practice. Indeed, she argues that this gap between rhetoric and practice stems from the shape of the revolution itself. So did the revolution fail? This may be the wrong question, or at least not the most interesting question. (Did the French Revolution fail for having produced Napoleon?)
Focusing on Sichuan but keeping a sharp eye on the national context, Zheng argues that the revolution “heralded the very birth of modern Chinese political culture … a political transformation spearheaded by new ideas, in particular, the notions of rights, equality, and popular sovereignty…” (p. 9). And further, that although it was led by gentry and army officers who had lost their former allegiance to the Qing, the revolution also brought the masses into a reshaped political realm. She thus argues that the revolution failed only “in the most narrow, political sense” (p. 249).
Zheng presents a fascinating story of gentry, officials, militarists, constitutionalists, Gowned Brothers, revolutionaries, students, women, actors, and even coolies taking to the political stage, inspired directly or indirectly by the likes of Liang Qichao. Her analysis of their actions is also theoretically sophisticated, looking at the nature of social networks, collective action, and group consciousness.
On one level, this work confirms the view of the 1911 Revolution as led largely by reformist gentry operating mostly in a provincial context. The Tongmenghui revolutionaries were especially weak in Sichuan. Though Zheng would of course use different terminology, her thoughtful analysis is not too far from the diagnosis of the Chongqing circuit intendant Zhu You, who wrote in September 1911: “This rebellion was something initiated by the gentry and learned circles, then infiltrated by bandits, and later joined by stupid commoners” (p. 204).
On another level, this work presents a new story of the revolution, showing how in the case of Sichuan—where the revolution truly began—its course was shaped by rapidly changing circumstances and contingent events. Though Zheng does not say this explicitly, I was struck by the fabulous day-to-day incompetence of the post–Ci Xi regency, whose decisions virtually forced Sichuanese elites into outright revolution. Zheng essentially argues that the Sichuan constitutionalists were effectively if not consciously “revolutionary” at least from the time they organized tax resistance movements in 1910. And logically, their commitment to some kind of popular sovereignty was revolutionary in itself. However, I see no reason not to take their professions of loyalty to the emperor right through the summer of 1911 at face value, even while they sought to take over the provincial government. The line between protest and revolution can be hazy, but it is revealing that the Sichuan constitutionalists did not call for a republic à la the Tongmenghui until events left them no choice.
Zheng's discussion of why a new political culture based on rights, equality, and republicanism led to banditry and warlordism is briefer. She highlights the inability of new power centers to compromise rather than throwing all blame on Yuan Shikai and his Sichuan analogs. Zheng notes in passing that “people also became intoxicated by the idea that they all had power and all deserved to assert their power and will in the political arena” (p. 246), seeming to suggest that the new political culture was fatally flawed. This is worth further consideration, but one could also point to an earlier, old political culture in which both interests and compromise were immoral.
Be that as it may, several other issues are worth further discussion. Zheng has a tendency to conflate “gentry” and “people,” implicitly accepting the claims of gentry (or the new foreign-educated elites) to speak for the people. But these are claims that should be taken with a grain of salt before as well as after the revolution.
More importantly for Zheng's analysis, while a major aspect of the new political culture revolved around rights, equality, and popular sovereignty, at least as important, in my view, were notions of duties, social order and the cultivation of citizens, ethnic consciousness, and state sovereignty. Another problem is to distinguish between those aspects of political culture that speak to the legitimacy of rulers on the one hand, and those aspects that are implicit, institutional, and habitual norms rather than rhetorical on the other. One might further ask whether the endless claims of the new political elites to be speaking for the people in the 1910s led the new political culture to self-destruct. That is, whether their manifest hypocrisy so tarnished “rights, equality, and popular sovereignty” that the republican political culture was virtually stillborn.
The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China is worth the attention of every student of modern China both for its argument outlined above and for its narrative of the revolution in Sichuan, which this review does not have the space to more than point to.
