Season 14, Episode 3: The Republic of China
On February 12, 1912, the Qing Dynasty officially ended with the abdication of the final emperor, the four-year-old Puyi, and the official transfer of power from the Qing government to the fledgling Republic of China. This event marked a dramatic transformation in Chinese history as over three and a half thousand years of dynastic imperial rule was interrupted in favor of a completely different form of government. While dynasties had come and gone throughout China’s history, the former dynasty collapsing as an ascendant rival dynasty claims the mandate of heaven had always been the established pattern. This time, however, instead of an ascendant dynasty, there was a confederation of revolutionaries who mostly hewed toward an electoral republican form of government. Successfully establishing such a government in a land which had toiled under a series of absolute monarchies would be a monumental challenge.
On January 1, 1912, with fifteen of the Qing Dynasty’s twenty-four provinces declaring their independence, delegates from those free provinces elected Sun Yat-sen as president of the provisional government. The original seat of power was Nanjing, a storied city in central eastern China which the revolutionaries had managed to seize. Debate ensued over which great city would serve as the capital for the new republic but when Yuan Shikai offered to arrange the abdication of the young emperor in exchange for securing the presidency himself, the answer became, inescapably, Beijing. It had been the capital since the Yuan Dynasty of Kublai Khan and, of course, it is presently the capital of the People’s Republic of China.
Not all of the revolutionary leaders were happy with making Yuan Shikai the president. This was a man whom they had just been violently fighting, a man responsible for the deaths of many of their comrades. Even looking beyond the personal stakes, Yuan Shikai had just been serving as the prime minister for the Qing government, whom he had seemingly turned against without too much internal turmoil. On the other hand, there were practical reasons to compromise with Shikai by making him president of the provisional republic. Doing so both ended the bloodshed of the revolution and also accomplished one of the revolution’s most pressing goals - kicking the Manchus out of power. However, compromising with Yuan Shikai on both the presidency and the selection of Beijing as the capital of the provisional republic left a sour taste in the mouth of the revolutionaries. It was a deal that Sun Yat-sen would soon come to regret.
On March 10, 1912, Yuan Shikai was officially sworn in as the provisional president of the Republic of China. During much of the year that followed, he clashed repeatedly with elected revolutionaries who were drafting the constitution for the republic. In spite of their misgivings over making this man their president, the practical fact was that he still controlled the New Army while their own rebel forces had long since laid down arms and returned to their regular lives. Yuan Shikai was keenly aware of this imbalance as well, and on a few occasions he even rewrote sections of the provisional constitution to suit his needs and enhance the power of his office at the expense of the elected bodies.
By the summer of 1912, the situation was looking grim for the provisional government. Elections were fast approaching and it was clear to many of the revolutionary leaders that they needed a strong showing to counterbalance the king-like power with which Yuan Shikai was operating. One revolutionary leader in particular was determined to rein in the president and establish a clear balance of power. Song Jiaoren was a longtime member of revolutionary societies and a founding member of the Tongmenghui. In August of 1912, he founded a political party called Kuomintang, meaning the “Chinese Nationalist Party.” I will refer to them henceforth as the KMT, a common abbreviation.
Song Jiaoren was an extremely vocal critic of President Yuan Shikai and he often publicly lambasted the president as a wannabe monarch. He cast a vision for the future Republic of China as a nation of proper checks and balances, wherein the power of the representative assembly and the senate could counteract executive overreach when necessary and act independently of presidential approval. It was a vision shared by most of his revolutionary brethren, though some were alienated by what they perceived as arrogance from Jiaoren, who spoke his mind very freely and often without polite filters.
In December of 1912, elections were held for the two houses of the national assembly -- the senate and the house of representatives. Thanks to the vigorous organizing efforts of Song Jiaoren and his fellow leaders, KMT gained the majority of seats in both houses. It was expected that they would soon rein in the excesses of president Yuan Shikai just as Song Jiaoren had publicly campaigned to do.
However, in March of 1913, while traveling to Beijing to participate in the National Assembly, Song Jiaoren was accosted at a railway station and shot twice by a gunman. He died soon after. The gunman was taken into custody and in the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the whole affair was a contract killing; he had been hired by Ying Guixin, a former military officer who had taken up work as a figure of the criminal underworld. Further evidence pointed to Zhao Bingjun, a member of the president’s cabinet. Both Ying Guixin and Zhao Bingjun were themselves killed during the investigation, stopping the evidence trail cold. In spite of a lack of direct evidence, there is little doubt among Chinese historians that it was Yuan Shikai who was pulling the strings. Speaking for myself, he is fairly high on my list of suspects.
In April, as discontent grew against his government, President Yuan Shikai committed China to taking a massive loan of 25 million pounds sterling from Japan, Britain, Germany, France, and Russia. He did this without consulting the National Assembly, much less asking any kind of permission, and he earmarked the bulk of the funding for his New Army. Likewise, he unilaterally signed an agreement with Russia that allowed them to station troops in the province of Outer Mongolia.
Throughout the summer of 1913, Shikai sought to remove KMT members from positions of power. He thus ordered the dismissal of Li Liejun as the governor of Jiangxi Province, as well as the KMT-supporting governor of Tibet, replacing them both with loyalist generals. He also ordered arrests of unfriendly leaders throughout Wuhan Province and then moved loyal New Army divisions into Jiangxi, anticipating an armed uprising which he hoped to quickly crush. On July 12, said uprising began when Li Liejun returned to Jiangxi and proclaimed its independence from the provisional Republic of China.
The latest conflict is generally referred to as the “Second Revolution” and it went far worse for rebel forces than their previous uprising against the Qing Dynasty. Lasting only a few months, the second revolution was a bleak affair that was composed mostly of rebel armies defending proclamations of independence in cities and provinces throughout southern China being systematically crushed with the artillery, machine guns, and the New Army’s equivalent of Special Forces squads. One by one, rebel strongholds were reduced, and any KMT-friendly governors who survived submitted to Yuan Shikai, who promptly afterward dismissed them from office and installed a loyalist to take their place. The whole affair was ended, militarily speaking, by early September.
Sun Yat-sen fled China in August, toward the end of the Second Revolution, and sought shelter in Tokyo. This was not his first time staying in Japan. In 1900, during one of his earlier periods of exile, he had stayed there for some time and was even heard to remark (quote) "The Meiji Restoration is the first step of the Chinese revolution, and the Chinese revolution is the second step of the Meiji Restoration." (end quote) His hope at the time was that Japan’s own modernization efforts, which were clearly more successful than their counterparts in Korea and China, would be made available to his homeland once a new political status quo had been properly established. That dream was, for the moment, deferred, as Yuan Shikai consolidated power after the Second Revolution was summarily crushed.
Near the beginning of 1914, the president formally dissolved China’s National Assembly. He then proceeded to assemble a party of sixty-six cronies who drafted a new constitution which was meant to give legitimacy to his upcoming absolute dictatorship. In May, that constitution was complete and, predictably, it vested most of the nation’s power in Yuan Shikai, giving him direct authority over foreign policy, finances, civil rights, and, of course, the military. Democracy in China was, for the moment, seemingly dead.
Wanting to prevent yet another revolution that might challenge his power, he engaged in a complete overhaul of the provincial governments. Every province was given a military-governor as well as a civilian governor. The military governors each commanded their own provincial army, something which would come to define the next period of Chinese history. Yuan Shikai also ordered new coins to be struck by the treasury: silver coins worth one yuan each, which bore his portrait in profile.
Later in 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated while touring Serbia, an incident whose fallout we will examine in far greater detail in the next two episodes. As the First World War began in Europe, Japan saw an opportunity to expand its domination of East Asia, beginning with the German operation in Shandong Province. The Germans had been leasing Shandong from the Chinese since the end of the Boxer Rebellion and the Japanese government still nurtured a grudge against Germany for the role it played at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, in which they joined with Russia and France in convincing Japan to give the Liaodong Peninsula back to China. Russia had already paid the price for their defiance of the Japanese Empire, and now Germany would feel their wrath as the Japanese joined the world war on the side of the Entente Powers of Britain, France, Italy and, ironically, Russia.
As the Japanese seized German holdings in China, and as the rest of the world was distracted by the ongoing war in Europe, they decided to try and flex their muscles against China as well. In early 1915, as it became clear that the great war was not going to end soon, the Imperial government delivered a document known as Nijūikka jō Yōkyū, better known in English as “the Twenty-One Demands.” This document was meant to be a private, secret agreement between the Empire of Japan and the nominal Republic of China, if said republic agreed and ratified the treaty.
Many of the demands were really just reasonable proposals which, frankly, the Republic of China probably would have been completely happy to accept. Japan wanted confirmation of the coastal settlements they had just seized from the Germans as well as extending Japan’s lease in Manchuria, where they had control of the Southern Manchuria Railway, for 99 years. They also wanted permission to set up mining and manufacturing in the province of Inner Mongolia, as well as permission to station troops there. You may recall that Russia had gained permission to station troops in Outer Mongolia; this maneuver by the Japanese was almost certainly aimed at containing Russia and preventing them from venturing any further into the far east.
There were further demands for permission to seize the operations of a few Chinese mining companies who were deeply indebted to Japan. Still, so far these seem like reasonable requests which could have been fairly negotiated. However, a further demand was that China would be forbidden from leasing any land to foreign powers going forward. The demands that followed insisted that the Republic of China hire Japanese advisors to reform their police and national finance system, as well as ceding to Japan the coastal city of Fujian, which was just across from the Japanese-owned island of Taiwan. The final group of demands were more than just polite, well-meaning requests for mutually beneficial exchange; they amounted to giving Japan control over China’s foreign and domestic policy in a similar manner by which Japan had taken control of Korea’s.
The Chinese government stalled for several months, but eventually leaked the entire document to the press. While the Entente Powers in Europe were mostly occupied prosecuting a grinding, costly war against the Central Powers, they were not too busy to express their outrage over this attempted power grab. As we discussed last season, the nations of the so-called “west” had a vested interest in maintaining access to Chinese resources, especially their vast coal fields. Japan transforming China into a larger version of their takeover of Korea could mean that other imperial governments could lose that access, which was not something they were willing to risk.
Within China itself, the populace reacted with virulent animosity toward anything Japanese. Large-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations erupted in various cities, and organizers successfully staged a national boycott against Japanese goods. In April of 1915, with Japan embarrassed and with worldwide public opinion firmly on their side, the government of Yuan Shikai rejected the twenty-one demands. However, now that they were publicly committed, the Japanese empire had no intention of dropping the matter entirely. Their leaders were convinced that they had erred by asking for far too many concessions and scaled their demands down to just thirteen demands, which they sent to China on May 7, giving a two-day deadline for China to respond. If they refused, or if they failed to respond, Japan threatened to declare war.
Excised from the revised demands were the more sweeping foreign and domestic policy controls which Japan had initially wanted. It was a compromise to be sure - Japan would have to settle for recognition of their interest in Inner Mongolia, ownership of certain Chinese mining companies, and an extended lease for the Southern Manchurian Railway - but the hard truth, for China, was that no one was in a position to come and save them in the event of an actual Japanese invasion. Their own military was far from powerless but president Yuan Shikai preferred to keep the various armies deployed to troublesome provinces which might, in the event of a foreign incursion, try to become independent once more. He yielded to the revised thirteen demands, which led to no small amount of national unrest as the Chinese people whom he governed protested and demonstrated against his government.
In the year that followed, president Yuan Shikai continued to tighten his hold on power by leaning heavily into a revival of Confucian rituals and trappings of traditional Chinese governance. He was encouraged to make himself a monarch by various foreign representatives, including Japanese negotiators who promised to support his sovereignty in exchange for his agreeing to their aforementioned demands. He began to appear in traditional imperial attire in public and in December of 1915 a special session of the National Assembly voted unanimously to offer Yuan Shikai the imperial throne as the founder of a new dynasty.
In January of 1916, Yuan Shikai officially declared that he would become the emperor of China, taking the name Hongxian, meaning “Constitutional Abundance.” However, becoming the new son of heaven did not actually solve every national problem at once. Domestically, this seizure of power inspired mass unrest among the populace, who were still deeply dissatisfied with the presi -- sorry, emperor’s capitulation to Japan. The foreign powers who had initially encouraged Yuan Shikai to become an emperor now refused to acknowledge his new title. Many of his closest supporters in the upper ranks of government now abandoned him, criticizing him publicly and declaring that he had betrayed the revolution and the republic. His sons argued amongst one another regarding which of them was most deserving to become the new crown prince. Rather than uniting the nation, his imperial power grab had made China more fractious than ever.
His time as emperor-in-waiting (his installation was never finalized) lasted until March of 1916 - only eighty-three days - before he finally abandoned the effort and promised to restore the republic as it was. By then, it was far too late. Military-governors among provinces in the south banded together to oppose the restoration of imperial government and had already declared their independence. Guizhou and Guangxi, among many others, now vowed to take up arms to resist the wannabe emperor and ensure the future of a republic in China. Complicating matters, Yuan Shikai had been suffering from chronic illness for some time and was in no physical condition to assert his own authority. In June of 1916, three months after he had abdicated as emperor, he died.
Sadly, the death of Yuan Shikai did not bring about a new age of national unity and republican government throughout China. The nation had already been divided roughly between southern and northern factions, but even these confederations would suffer their own share of internal strife and infighting which led to further splintering as the nation stumbled into a terribly chaotic civil war which would last over a decade. The next period in Chinese History is commonly referred to as “The Warlord Era” and even when that period was over, it would still be some time before China was a united nation once more.
We will return to China to discuss the Warlord Era later this season because that Era does end just a few years after the Taisho Period. Next time, however, we will turn our eyes toward Europe in the summer of 1914, where the assassination of an Archduke and his wife would lead the continent, and indeed much of the entire world, straight into a grueling four-year war.