The Leading Roles of Reform and Revolution in the Sociocultural Trends of the Final Years of the Qing Dynasty

Abstract

In 20 years of bitter reflection after the Opium Wars, the Chinese began to gain some comprehension of the main trends in the world and to realize they had to learn something from the strong points of the adversaries who had defeated them. And so there ensued 30 years of Westernization (yang wu), during which the concept of Zhongi Ti Xi Yong (i.e., Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong: “Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical applications”—See Chapter 2) gradually took shape. China’s crushing defeat in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War further awakened forward-looking persons in China to the fact that merely learning from the West’s ship-building, gun-making, machinery manufacturing, science and technology, technical skills, and so forth was far from enough to extricate China from poverty and weakness and bring it prosperity and strength. China’s political system had to be reformed before there could be any hope of completely staving off danger and destruction and gradually attaining independence, wealth, and strength. This realization initiated the Reform Movement and anti-Manchu revolutions, which were followed by movements for new governance and constitutional government as well as wave after wave of revolutionary uprisings. In the end, since the Qing Dynasty refused to conscientiously implement reforms, people lost all confidence in it and revolutionary parties and constitutional factions together acted as the dynasty’s grave diggers. In the 17 or 18 years between 1895 and 1911, men and women of high ideals in China focused on political reform and took to either violent revolution or peaceful reform in the ultimate hope of replacing China’s 2,000-year-old system of sovereign autocracy with a Western-style political system that might save the country and the nation and take China onto a modern road of independence, democracy, prosperity, and strength. This was a period of momentous change centered on political revolution, a period of intermittent reforms and revolutions in which all cultural phenomena mirrored the revolutionary changes and embodied the all-pervading thoughts and anxieties and yearnings of the Chinese people. Industry and commerce, education, science, and technology and other such endeavors were oriented toward the cause of national salvation. Yet the key to saving the nation lay in doing away with authoritarianism and promoting civil rights. Constitutional monarchy and democratic republicanism were but options for realizing those ends.