See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/239770940

The 1911 Revolution: An End and a Beginning

Article  in  China Information · November 2011

DOI: 10.1177/0920203X11418247

CITATION READS

1 7,116

2 authors:

Arif Dirlik Roxann Prazniak

Independent Researcher University of Oregon
178 PUBLICATIONS   2,263 CITATIONS    18 PUBLICATIONS   83 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Arif Dirlik on 27 June 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

418247 CIN25310.1177/0920203X11418247Dirlik and PrazniakChina Information

Article china

INFORMATION
The 1911 Revolution:
An end and a beginning
China Information
25(3) 213­–231
© The Author(s) 2011
Arif Dirlik Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Independent scholar, Eugene, USA DOI: 10.1177/0920203X11418247
cin.sagepub.com

Roxann Prazniak
University of Oregon, USA

Abstract
The 1911 Revolution was a momentous event in bringing down the monarchical institution
with a history of 2,000 years. Yet its consequences were ambiguous, it was overshadowed by
the more radical revolution that followed in 1949, and it was stigmatized by the defeat of the
Kuomintang, which claimed it as its own. Its ‘revolutionariness’ has been in question even as it
has been celebrated as a turning point in modern Chinese history. This discussion reaffirms the
revolutionary significance of the event, but also suggests that it is best viewed as a ‘high peak’ in a
revolution of long duration that is yet to be completed. The current regime in China has revived
aspects of monarchical culture and practices that revolutionaries sought to abolish in 1911. Most
importantly, the promise of full citizenship for all that animated the 1911 Revolution remains
unfulfilled, which may explain the contemporary regime’s nervousness over the celebration of its
100th anniversary.

Keywords
1911 Revolution, Communist Party, the Kuomintang, modern China, revolution

An opportunity to reflect on the 1911 (xinhai, 幸亥) Revolution also provides an occa-
sion to rethink the Chinese revolution as a whole and the idea of revolution itself. It
should come as no surprise that the unfolding of the revolution over the century that has
elapsed since then should unavoidably colour our views of the event. It is less obvious
but equally inevitable that any historical judgement on 1911 must also entail a judgement
on what came after. The politically sensitive nature of evaluations of 1911 was demon-
strated once again recently when Communist Party officials stepped in to abort plans
for an inter-university discussion of 1911 by graduate students in 16 major universities

Corresponding author:
Arif Dirlik, 3620 University St., Eugene, OR 97405, USA
Email: dirlikster@gmail.com

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

214 China Information 25(3)

in Beijing and Tianjin.1 References to ‘democracy’ in the plans was possibly a major
reason. It also reflected a desire on the part of the Party to preempt deviation from its
own carefully calibrated evaluation of 1911 as an important landmark in a century of
revolution that nevertheless must take the back seat to the Communist victory in 1949.
This is a question of some significance in the midst of negotiations for reunification with
the Kuomintang on Taiwan, which claims the 1911 Revolution as its own.
Beyond its significance in negotiations over political legitimacy, the 1911 Revolution
presents important historical and conceptual questions concerning its status as a revolu-
tionary event, the nature of the social forces that went into its making, and what it may
have to tell us about the idea of revolution that has been crucial to the historiography not
only of China but Euromodernity as a global phenomenon. These questions have never
lent themselves to unambiguous answers – not just because of their subjection to politi-
cal negotiation but also because of justifiable scholarly disagreement over the appropri-
ate concepts and categories deployed to give meaning to the event. They have been
further complicated over the last two decades by a regressive turn that is not unique to
post-revolutionary China but a general cultural characteristic of global modernity, when
the whole idea of progress that informed revolutions for two centuries has been thrown
into doubt with the repudiation of the spatial and temporal teleologies of Euromodernity.
In the case of China, as elsewhere, a universalist insistence on a technologically informed
idea of progress still dominates historical consciousness. But the consciousness is shared
presently with equal insistence by an urge to preserve pasts that earlier had been the
objects of revolutionary transformation or erasure. These pasts are now recalled in a
renaming of revolution as ‘renaissance’ or ‘revival’ or ‘rejuvenation’ (复興). In the his-
torical exhibit at the new National History Museum in Beijing, what used to be ‘modern’
(近代) history now appears as ‘the road to revival’ (興之路).
Ironically, these contemporary developments may enable us to perceive the complexi-
ties of the 1911 Revolution with greater clarity. If we focus our attention on what it repre-
sented rather than what it accomplished, 1911 appears much closer to the present than
either may be to the revolutionary aspirations that would come to dominate the period in
between, although that period, too, appears far more nuanced with the removal of the
intense light (or, for its foes, darkness) cast by the revolution. Indeed, a case can even be
made that 1911 was more advanced than the present in its political aspirations. The politi-
cal grounds it produced would ultimately provide the paths to the present, not as a predes-
tined eventuality, but with a political richness that is lacking presently. This may account
for the intensified sensitivity to its calibration by a post-revolutionary leadership that
draws sustenance from perpetuating faith in the inevitability of the revolution that brought
it to power even as it turns its back on the revolution’s social and political promises.

Ambiguities
In decades of teaching Modern China, the authors almost invariably have felt a certain
hesitation uttering the words ‘the 1911 Revolution’ – as if unsure that the events of that
year, understood broadly to cover the immediate periods before and after, qualified to be
included among the historical phenomena the latter term is intended to capture. There
was no similar hesitation with the 1949 Revolution – the Communist Revolution, or even

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 215

the Cultural Revolution. The only radical transformation the description of which invited
a similar hesitation was ‘reform and opening’ (改革開放) after 1978, also described by
many as a ‘revolution’ before the Tiananmen tragedy diminished the stature of Deng
Xiaoping, who after 1992 proceeded with the full-scale ‘revolutionary’ restoration of
capitalism. ‘Reform and opening’ seemed to suggest too soft a description of the radical
(this time around, radically anti-revolutionary) transformation at work.
Doubts about the nature of the 1911 Revolution were not ours alone, but pervasive
among scholars of China. In a review essay published in 1976, Joseph Esherick, a fore-
most scholar of the revolution, wrote that ‘the 1911 Revolution has long been eclipsed by
the far greater revolutionary struggles which followed it. And justifiably so. It was not
much of a revolution. Some have even questioned whether it deserves to be called a
“revolution” at all’.2 Indeed, in his seminal study of the revolution published about the same
time, Esherick went even further to suggest that the 1911 Revolution had not only been a
failure but even left China worse off than it had been under the Qing dynasty. He wrote:

The failure of the 1911 Revolution was much more than its failure to achieve the nationalist and
republican ideals to which it aspired … the fundamental weakness of the new Republic of
China derived from contradictions in the very structure of society. Under the Chinese empire a
variety of mechanisms had been developed to maintain the integration and stability of society.
Westernization did away with these mechanisms, and the social structure was weakened
accordingly. 1911 did establish a trend which carried through much of the modem era: a trend
toward rule by a Westernizing urban elite. But Mao Zedong did not continue that trend: he
reversed it.3

The questioning that began almost immediately in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution
has left a legacy that persists to this day. Revolutionary historiography of both the
Kuomintang and the Communist variety has left behind an ambivalent evaluation of
1911. Celebration of 1911 as a historical ‘turning point’ in these cases has been accom-
panied by an evaluation of it as a failed or unfinished revolution that would be carried to
a conclusion under the Kuomintang after 1928 or, for those who viewed Kuomintang
rule itself as one more failure, by the Communist Party in 1949.
Kuomintang historiography has endowed 1911 with iconic status as the birth of a new
China – the Republic of China (中华民國) – and the Kuomintang. A distinguished histo-
rian of the revolution has written that before 1949, the history of the revolution was writ-
ten not as part of national but of Kuomintang party history.4 From the beginning the party
identified the new name of the country with itself, carrying it to Taiwan after 1949. At its
founding in 1912 (to replace its predecessor organization, the Revolutionary Alliance, 同
盟會), it fixed the revolution as the year zero of a new calendar, similarly to reign eras in
the imperial period, a practice which persists in Taiwan. At the same time, however, the
Kuomintang which accomplished the revolutionary reunification of the country in 1928
viewed itself as carrying out the task that had been begun under Sun Yat-sen but had
remained unfinished due to the setbacks the revolution had suffered in the years after
1911. This was acknowledged by Sun Yat-sen himself when he withdrew to Japan after
1913 to make another revolution, and pursued its fulfilment until his death in 1925.5 The
party Sun established in Japan, the Revolutionary Party (革命黨), drew upon the lessons
of failure in 1911, namely loose organization that had rendered the revolutionaries too

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

216 China Information 25(3)

weak to resist the takeover of the revolution by forces hostile to its goals. The same les-
son was carried over to the revived Kuomintang after 1916, resulting in the decision to
adopt a Bolshevik organization after 1923.
Communist historiography has assigned 1911 an even more elevated status as a ‘bour-
geois revolution’ which carried world-historical significance. It was a step in the forma-
tion of a Chinese nation, to be sure. Beyond that, it represented the overthrow of a ‘feudal’
political order that gave it a commonality with modern nationalist revolutions such as the
American and the French, and was the first of its kind in Asia. Perhaps most importantly,
1911 as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ served as a marker on the way to socialism – indicating
in the case of China the arrival of a universal historical stage that prepared the ground for
the coming of communism. Its temporality, too, was both national and world time, which
also suggested that its meaning was not just national but also global, and must be weighed
against other instances of bourgeois revolution. But here, too, an ambiguity persisted in
the evaluation of the revolution. Like Sun in the 1910s, beginning in the 1920s Communist
theorists portrayed 1911 as a revolution that had failed due to the ‘weakness’ of the bour-
geoisie as a class, compounded by poor organization of the revolutionaries.6 In officially
sanctioned Communist historiography this ‘bourgeois revolution’ (the ‘old democracy’)
remained an unfinished task, to be carried to completion under the Party’s programme of
‘New Democracy’, proclaimed by Mao Zedong himself in 1940.7 ‘New Democracy’
represented the assimilation to the Communist Party’s revolutionary programme of Sun
Yat-sen’s revolutionary programme as it had taken shape in the 1920s.8 The programme
also rendered the Communist Party into the true heir of the promise of 1911 against a
Kuomintang that had turned anti-revolutionary in the 1930s following the death of its
founding leader, Sun Yat-sen. Official history textbooks in China continue to refer to
1911 as a ‘bourgeois revolution’,9 which, we might add, remains to be completed in the
still promised transition to socialism. In this case, too, 1911 appears as the beginning of
a revolution that still awaits completion. Why the ambivalence, when to all appearances
the 1911 Revolution occasioned a momentous change in Chinese history, bringing down
not only the reigning Qing dynasty but the imperial order that had displayed remarkable
stability and endurance for six centuries? How could a revolution that had resulted in the
replacement of a monarchy with a republic be subject to doubt about what ‘revolutionariness’
is? And what about the nation-form that the revolution put in place that presupposed a
radically different relationship between state and society than that which had character-
ized the imperial order? Having raised the question of revolution in the passage cited,
Esherick continues to spell out several reasons why 1911 deserved to be described as a
revolution. The revolution, he wrote,

did end several millennia of imperial rule. The monarchy was replaced by a republic…. The
Confucian basis for imperial legitimacy was destroyed forever. Taking the term 1911 Revolution
in its usual broad sense to refer to the entire period from 1900 (or even 1895) to 1913, the
significance of the era becomes even more manifest. The abolition of the examinations destroyed
the traditional criterion for gentry status. The establishment of Chambers of Commerce allowed
and even encouraged merchant participation in the political process. The constitutional reforms
institutionalized the power of local elites to an unprecedented degree. The New Army gave
military men a ‘modern’ prestige which rivaled that of their civilian counterparts. And impelling

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 217

all of these changes forward was a pervading nationalism fueled by an intense fear that imperialism
would carve up China or even exterminate the Chinese race.10

A Chinese historian has recently referred to the political shift in 1911 as a ‘paradigm
shift’.11 And so it was. The revolution not only drew the curtain on the imperial political
order but transformed the principles of legitimacy it drew upon. In so many ways, it was
the founding act of a national polity that based itself on the secular legitimacy of the
nation rather than some divine principle deriving from ‘Heaven’. If divinity persisted, it
was now lodged in the nation.12 The change would prove to be irreversible. It withstood
two attempts at monarchical restoration in 1915 and again in 1917 that were rolled back
by broad alliances that included influential leaders such as Liang Qichao and his
Progressive Party (進步黨), who had been opposed to the revolution in the years preced-
ing it. Revolutionaries in ensuing years, including Communist revolutionaries, would
justify their causes by the promise of fulfilling its unfinished agenda.
How do we account for these conflicting views of 1911 as a turning point in Chinese
history with world-historical implications that was nonetheless ‘not much of a revolution’,
or if it was, only a failed or unfinished one? Perhaps the obvious answer is the ‘orthodox’
one that while the revolution brought down the old regime, it accomplished little by
way of establishing a new regime, in which case it would barely deserve to be called a
revolution however momentous an event the fall of the old regime may be. It may not be
very obvious these days when all insurrectionary acts are lumped together in condemna-
tion under one vague category of ‘terror’, but historians and other social scientists, not to
speak of populations at large, have worried over the years about revolutions, what they
meant, how they came about, what their consequences were, and how they differed from
similar events that entailed upheavals of one kind or another.13 What distinguished revo-
lutions from coup d’etat, insurgencies, insurrections, rebellions, or merely everyday forms
of misbehaviour was their ability or immanent promise to transform the existing social
and political order in significant breadth and depth in a progressive direction. What this
direction should be was subject to disagreement. Most, if not all, agreed on the necessity
of nation building and a strong state to fend off external enemies but also as a necessity
of modernity. Revolutionaries differed among themselves over details and paths of
change, but were in general accord over principles of equality (at least before the law),
justice, political participation if not formal democracy, greater welfare for all, and so on,
principles understood differently but shared by liberals, socialists alike, and even some
considered conservatives.14 They were most certainly professed by three or four genera-
tions of revolutionaries in China, who sought in revolutionary transformation a political
order that could defend China against outside forces but also realize these new political
values and social visions.
Consequences, in other words, have been crucial to distinguishing revolutions from
seemingly similar acts of insurrection. This also has been the case with the evaluation of
1911 by generations of Chinese revolutionaries and intellectuals, committed to creating
a strong and autonomous nation, who have found little to celebrate in its consequences.
Scholars have followed suit, as in the evaluation by Esherick quoted earlier, which sug-
gests that, politically speaking, the consequences of the revolution may have been nega-
tive, if not regressive, in overthrowing the imperial order without anything to put in its

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

218 China Information 25(3)

place. The revolution’s destruction of the norms and institutions that had held society
together under the Qing dynasty opened the way to government abuse of power, concen-
tration of wealth and power in the hands of the gentry elite in local society, and oblivi-
ousness to the countryside. With the tightening of foreign power, the initiative for change
was to shift to a Westward-looking urban elite committed to urban industrial develop-
ment. Neither of these changes was conducive to the achievement of autonomous national
development which had been a fundamental goal of the revolution. The real revolution
would have to await Mao Zedong.
Given the chaos and depredations that characterized warlord politics over the next
two decades, there seems to be ample justification for depicting 1911 as a politically
regressive event that set back China’s development. This was the view of the constitu-
tional monarchists, such as Kang Youwei, who continued to hold on to the possibility of
reviving the monarchy. Kang was to participate in one such effort in 1917. The effort
may be dismissed as that of a frustrated reformer, but the conviction was not his alone. It
has found renewed hearing in recent years. Two distinguished intellectuals, Li Zehou and
Liu Zaifu, argued in their book published in 1996, Good-bye to Revolution (吿别革命),
that the English Revolution would have served better as a model for China than the
French Revolution which inspired the radicals in the late Qing.15 Discussions of civil
society in China, popular in the 1990s, raised the possibility that the revolution had
adverse effects on, if not aborted, an incipient civil society in the late Qing.16 This is also
the view espoused in a recently published study of 1911 by Zhang Ming, a professor at
Renmin University, which has been quite influential for its provocative thesis.17 One may
wonder whether the celebration of Spring Festival at the Temple of Heaven this past
spring is an expression in the realm of public culture of similar sentiments – as nostalgia
tourism if nothing else.18
There is not much dispute about the failure of the 1911 Revolution to achieve national
consolidation. In significant ways, the outcome of the revolution as described by Esherick
was implicit in its very unfolding. It may be possible to speak of the revolutionization of
Chinese society in the last two decades of the Qing, when imperialist pressure abroad
and attendant structural changes within led to the emergence of new forces that the old
regime would prove to be unable to contain, but it is far more difficult to speak of a
coherent revolutionary organization and ideology that might be able to produce coherent
results in case of a regime change. The coherence ascribed to revolutionaries was the
product rather of hindsight constructions – by the Kuomintang in the 1930s seeking to
establish a revolutionary lineage for itself, or the Communists anxious to discover a
‘bourgeois’ revolution that was the necessary precedent for their own. Revolutionary
forces proliferated in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, as did revolutionary organiza-
tions devoted to the overthrow of that dynasty. But when the moment of revolution came,
unexpectedly, on 10 October 1911, the initiative almost immediately passed over to non-
revolutionary reform institutions that had been put in place by the monarchy. True, it was
revolutionaries who pulled the trigger that set off the avalanche that would bring down
the monarchy, establish a republic, and install as its first president a revolutionary who
for more than a decade had pursued an anti-monarchic republican ideal tinged with traces
of socialism, Sun Yat-sen.19 Ironically, Sun himself was not in China when the revolution
broke out. The avalanche took the form, as demonstrated in a brilliant analysis by the late

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 219

John Fincher, of secession from the Empire of the provinces, led by the military leaders
and the provincial assemblies that the Qing had put in place as part of a programme of
establishing a modern military and a constitutional monarchy.20 Against the monarchy,
these provincial leaders claimed another legitimacy, the legitimacy derived from a small
but influential electorate that now juxtaposed itself to the throne as ‘the people’ (民).
These same institutions would provide the cores of provincialism for the next two
decades – both as the basis of warlord power and equally importantly of demands for a
federal government. The political vacuum at the centre would be at the mercy during these
same years of warlord power alignments, including two failed attempts in 1915 and 1917
to restore the monarchy. It was these provincial forces that a new revolutionary generation
dubbed ‘feudal’ forces in the 1920s, and conjoined to imperialism as one the two targets
of revolution. Sun Yat-sen, who had acknowledged the failure of the revolution in 1913
and turned to a more conspiratorial form of revolutionary organization, emerged once
again as the leader of a reorganized Kuomintang allied with the Communist Party and the
Soviet Union.21 It would take at least two more revolutions, in 1925–1928, and again after
the Second World War, to achieve even the minimal goal of national unification.

Was the revolution not revolutionary?

Despite seemingly irrefutable evidence of failure, it is important not to take at face value
arguments that 1911 produced nothing positive of consequence, if only because both the
Kuomintang and the Communist Party have used those failures as a foil against which to
justify their own revolutions even as they claimed its mantle. We should remember also
that the failure of the revolutionaries to achieve their goals needs to be distinguished
from what the revolution brought about. By that measure, subsequent Chinese revolu-
tions in 1928 and 1949, and perhaps all revolutions, have been failures. The failure of
revolutionaries, moreover, does not prima facie imply the failure of the Revolution itself.
If 1911 may be remembered as an ‘unfinished’ revolution, it may be due to reasons other
than the inability of revolutionaries to assume power.
The uprising of 10 October may have erupted unexpectedly, but it was the work of mili-
tary units planning revolution. The revolution itself was hardly accidental given the new
forces on the emergence. Youth exposed to new ideas, military men of a new type, modern
businessmen, women’s and labour organizations all demanded a restructuring of politics.22
These groups were mobilized during the last decades of the Qing dynasty, not only in pur-
suit of their various interests but by a pervasive commitment to nation building and national
autonomy in an environment of imperialism. While 1911 shared with previous episodes of
dynastic change a deterioration of central political power and unrest in the countryside, it
was these new urban forces that gave the revolution its direction. Qing reforms to deal with
this new situation by moving towards a constitutional monarchy played no little part in
hastening the onrush of revolution in more ways than one. The ‘New Policies’ (新政) pre-
sented new financial and organizational challenges that the Qing dynasty proved unable to
overcome. The constitutional reforms, on the other hand, created new sources of legiti-
macy that would be used against the regime by its opponents.23 The demise of the Qing was
a classic case of modernization breeding revolution, contrary to a tendency since the 1990s
to juxtapose the one against the other as alternatives.24

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

220 China Information 25(3)

This also exposes the fallacy of arguments that suggest that constitutional monarchy
offered an alternative path that was not taken, or that the revolution aborted a civil soci-
ety in formation, which are based on normative judgements rather than serious historical
examination of why these alternatives proved to be dead ends. It was institutions created
by Qing efforts to establish a constitutional monarchy that ultimately would serve as the
vehicles of revolutionary change once the revolutionaries had triggered it. Even more
remarkable was the response to efforts to revive the monarchy, the first in 1915 by then
President Yuan Shikai, and then once again in 1917 by one of his lieutenants, Zhang Xun.
Both attempts were rolled back not by revolutionaries but by armed opposition from
provincial leaders who, whatever their individual motivations, did so in defence of the
republic. It is interesting that, despite the apparent cynicism, Yuan would assume for his
planned monarchy the reign title of ‘Glorious constitution’ (宏憲) while Qing loyalist
Marshall Zhang Xun was given to criticizing militarism in the name of the republic and
citizens’ rights.25 Even the cynicism may be testimonial to the hold of the new republican
legitimacy and the discourse of citizenship on the political elite. The revolution might
have failed in its ability to unify the country under a new regime, but it proved to be
irreversible in what it had achieved.
While politically of a different order, arguments that set the revolution against civil
society suffer from a similar tendentiousness, as if civil society should be restricted to
those in society who carried out their activities within the parameters of the existing order.
The local gentry-merchant elite that the Qing dynasty called upon for service in the New
Policies in its waning days did not just constitute a new ‘public’ but also contributed to
disorder in its exploitative activities.26 On the other hand, if we understand civil society in
the more proper sense of all the constituencies that sought participation in public affairs,
including politics, it is quite evident that it was the inability of the dynasty to contain or
incorporate these new constituencies that finally doomed it. As with the ‘modernization’
of which it is an aspect, the emergence of a complex civil society was an indispensable
force of the revolution. The revolution itself would issue in fertile grounds for the growth
of civil society in the fragmentation of power that ensued. Too much attention to politics
alone disguises the further transformation of Chinese society in these years with urbaniza-
tion, the appearance of new classes (such as the bourgeoisie and the working class), and
earlier constituencies such as students’ and women’s organizations that would play crucial
roles in the May Fourth Movement and the urban revolution that ensued. Most dramatic
would be the mobilization for revolution of the rural population that the revolutionaries of
1911 had largely ignored (except within the context of secret societies).
It was not merely by default – the evaporation of centralized power – that these new
forces acquired political significance. Warlords were a mixed lot, to be sure, ready to
resort to thuggery in the preservation of their power. Their conflicts no doubt also did
much damage to the country, inflicting misery upon the common people in particular. On
the other hand, many warlords in their respective territories not only continued to collabo-
rate with the provincial assemblies but some of them proved to be modernizers in their
own right. Many of them were products of military academies at home and abroad that
had acquired a new prestige with the search of militarism that had accompanied the con-
sciousness of national crisis. If some sought only to enhance their power through modern-
izing activities, others were committed modernizers by virtue of education and experience.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 221

Still others, such as Chen Jiongming in Guangdong and Fujian, were radicals, and in the
1920s gave support to anarchists and communists in their territories. Their activities
obstructed nation building and unification, to be sure, but that is not sufficient to dis-
qualify them as either nationalists or revolutionaries except from the perspective of a
nationalism premised on political centralism as the ultimate goal. Japanese historians of
the period saw in Chinese local associations the promise of a democratic order to come.27
We might remember that the stigma of warlord would haunt the Kuomintang in the 1930s,
even after it had unified the country. Militarism in 20th-century Chinese politics was not
a throwback to a ‘feudal’ age, but the very product of nationalism.
But perhaps the greatest legacy of the revolution was the emergence of a new para-
digm of politics already referred to. It was struggles for citizenship that brought about the
revolution, and the revolution was the first political event that made it into an irreversible
agendum of politics.28 Citizenship presupposed a new relationship between the rulers
and the ruled – from ruler/subject to nation-state/citizen – that would henceforth serve as
the basis for political legitimacy. It went hand in hand with the project of nation building,
and if the latter has served as an excuse for curtailing the rights of citizenship, demands
for those rights have in turn been a powerful motive force of revolution. The new idea of
citizenship derived additional force from a new valorization of public opinion in the
years before 1911, which continued through the next decade, erupting in full force with
the May Fourth Movement.29
The new paradigm also points to the global context and connections of the 1911
Revolution. We are not referring here only to the imperialism that was in the process of
bringing the world into the midst of China both symbolically and literally, to Hong Kong,
Guangzhou and Shanghai that stand today as emblems of Chinese globality. No less
important was the motion it set in Chinese intellectuals, merchants, and workers who
would come to provide the most forceful agents of revolution. The late Qing revolution-
ary movement was cosmopolitan from the beginning both in the experiences abroad of
its guiding lights and of their entanglement with revolutionaries from other societies –
particularly East Asian – in this age of ferment on the eve of the First World War.30
Present-day Chinese textbooks rank Sun Yat-sen, along with Mohandas Gandhi and
Mustafa Kemal, among the agents of ‘the awakening of Asia’. The 1911 Revolution was
one of the many Asian revolutionary upheavals of the time, inspired by some (e.g. the
Young Turks) and inspiring others (e.g. Vietnam). It also bore similarities, that remain
yet to be explored, to the Mexican Revolution that erupted just about the same time. And,
of course, it had its own particular cosmopolitanism in the networks of Chinese abroad,
who played a major part in the making of revolution by the resources they made avail-
able to constitutional monarchists and revolutionaries alike.31 That was the reason Sun
Yat-sen was away in Denver, Colorado, when the revolution erupted on 10 October 1911.
Overseas Chinese support would continue past the revolution in their modernizing activ-
ities in South China and Shanghai.32
This is not to suggest that the revolution is to be attributed to foreign causes, although
imperialist activity certainly played an important part in its instigation. Neither does it
mean that structural conditions of Chinese society were irrelevant to its outcome. This is
most obvious with the claims in Communist historiography. If the 1911 Revolution is to
be understood as a ‘bourgeois revolution’, the bourgeoisie in question was significantly

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

222 China Information 25(3)

different from what Karl Marx had in mind for Europe. Mercantile groups were involved
in the revolution, to be sure, and the ideology espoused by revolutionaries such as Sun
Yat-sen was an ideology that sought to create a capitalist society, modified by borrow-
ings from socialism and past philosophical legacies. Even Kang Youwei’s idea of Datong
or Great Unity, an ancient idea, was filled with the content of a post-industrial society. As
Communist historians have conceded all along, however, this was not a class that was
powerful enough to serve as the vanguard of a new, capitalist, society. What is discussed
less often is that the Chinese bourgeoisie was not just mercantile or industrial, but often
had close connections to the countryside economically and socially, just as most Chinese
workers were not in the industrial proletariat for similar reasons. There was a burgeoning
urban bourgeoisie including overseas Chinese merchants that shared in the ideals of a
strong nation, but when they were forced to choose, their own class interests led them to
throw in their lot with a class that was quite complex in composition.
In light of the popular scope the Chinese revolution assumed from the 1920s, the 1911
Revolution appears as a restricted elite affair that brought down the monarchy almost by
accident. And if it did bring down the imperial order, it did little to transform the social
relations that had been the foundation of that order. Quite the reverse. Once the central-
izing institutions of the imperial regime had been overthrown by the revolution, the revo-
lution itself fell prey to the centrifugal forces of localism and regionalism that had
characterized the old order. In its capture by existing local elites, the 1911 Revolution
appears more than anything else as what Gramsci described as a ‘passive revolution’, in
which revolutionary forces not quite powerful enough to overthrow the system are
absorbed into the existing structure of social power, losing their revolutionary momen-
tum in what appears like a restoration, but nevertheless continuing to erode the structure
in ‘molecular changes’.33 If in 1911 the revolutionary forces could trigger a ‘bourgeois
revolution’, the bourgeoisie was itself too weak to carry out the revolution, or to harness
popular forces in its cause, and ended up yielding to the local elites. That these local
elites combined landed and commercial economic power possibly made class composi-
tion more complicated and the alliance more plausible, as they could not be dismissed as
the ‘feudal’ object of revolution.34 At any rate, it was these elites that would be the targets
of revolution in its next phase.

The revolution in historical perspective

If ‘the 1911 Revolution has long been eclipsed by the far greater revolutionary struggles
which followed it’, as Esherick wrote in 1976, when the struggles for revolution still
seemed to be an ongoing proposition, is it possible that three-and-a-half decades later,
when those struggles in turn have become a distant memory and their shadows dissi-
pated, what may be of the greatest interest is the illumination the revolution of 1911 casts
upon the present? There is a suggestion of such a turn in the speculation that China would
have been better off had it moved along the wake of constitutional monarchies such as
the United Kingdom rather than following the example of the violent French model.
Equally if not more significant may be the concern displayed by the current regime about
open-ended interpretations of the 1911 Revolution which may lead in interpretive direc-
tions that it is determined to avoid. The organizing committee for the graduate-student

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 223

discussion included one academic who had proposed that the revolution had been a mis-
take in delaying the people’s schooling in democracy.
The issue involves more than normative judgements. Much of the ambivalence about
1911 has been the product of a methodological rendering of it into a discreet historical
event that can then be compared to other similar events abroad or in China, and found
wanting in its consequences. There is, however, another alternative: viewing it as one
phase in a much longer revolution that began sometime in the 19th century, and is yet
to come to a conclusion. Schwartz once wrote that ‘when we view the May Fourth
Movement from the perspective of the 30 years which preceded it, it no longer resembles
a mountain range rising abruptly out of a flat plain, but simply a somewhat higher range
in a long stretch of a complex mountainous terrain’.35 How much higher one range may
be than others remains a historical problem, as do the links that make mountains into a
range. But the point may be applied to 1911 as well, as has been done often enough despite
the insistence on comparisons that presuppose otherwise.
1911 was certainly a noticeably higher peak than most but perhaps lower than others
in a range of revolutions that were structured one after another both by past legacies and
a changing world situation. Its break with the past was real enough, but also limited by
the alignment of social forces in late imperial China. It was also a prelude itself to revo-
lutions yet to come, which learned from its shortcomings, and were able to overcome
them through new ideological and organizational technologies derived from a variety of
sources, including their own experiences.36 But it is clear from a present vantage point
that if the ‘revolutionariness’ of a revolution is to be judged by its ability to deliver what
it promised, all these revolutions have fallen significantly short of their promises – unless
we take those promises to be mere window dressing for national ‘wealth and power’. For
all its achievements since 1949, and especially since 1978, the Communist regime, too,
is yet to fulfil its goals – not just overcoming problems of inequality and social division
thrown up by its successful economic modernization, but the unfulfilled promises of its
predecessors.
The current regime takes justifiable pride in having delivered on the long-sought
promise of national wealth and power, about which there is no question among its friends
or foes. Equally obviously, not everyone is convinced that should be the end of the revo-
lution. Advocates of monarchic democracy, whose voices have become audible once
again, perceive the revolution as having taken the wrong path from its origins in the
20th century. Republican democrats continue to hark back to the post-1911 legacies of
the May Fourth Movement for politically empowering the people at large. The more con-
servative among them judge present-day authoritarianism unfavourably against the author-
itarian Kuomintang government of the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) that made the legacy
of 1911 its own. Democratic (as well as not-so-democratic) socialists see in the roll-back
of socialist goals in the post-Mao years a betrayal of promises of equality and justice that
are as old as the history of the revolution. The revolution remains unfinished.
It is no longer as easy as it seemed at the height of the revolutionary surge in the 1960s
and 1970s to point to the failures of 1911 to question its qualifications as a revolution. It
is clear from the ideological revalorization of past legacies in contemporary China and
the world at large that cultural revolution to break with the past, so dear to Chinese radi-
cals since the May Fourth Movement, does not serve as a measure of revolution – in

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

224 China Information 25(3)

China or elsewhere. And it is no longer very clear how much of a break there has been
when nostalgia for the past has reappeared as a defining characteristic not of conserva-
tives but so-called socialist modernizers. The nostalgia is extended by some to the mon-
archy itself, not just the monarchical institution, but the very Qing dynasty that had been
condemned by Han nationalists for being alien, much like in the case of those such as
Kang Youwei and Zhang Xun, who in the 1910s sought to revive the dynasty. Despite the
impressive reorganization of Chinese society after 1949 that produced unprecedented
centralization of power, anxieties about national integration persist, as in the case of a
recent work by a Party intellectual who, discussing the merits of democracy, expresses
fears of the return of warlordism as an argument against advocates of federalism.37
A case can be made that through a series of alterations in response to changes within
and without, what the Communist Party has achieved may well be viewed as a fulfilment
of the promise of the 1911 Revolution, as was articulated by Sun Yat-sen, whose name
would be attached irrevocably to the revolution when the Kuomintang made him ‘the
father of the nation’ (國父) in the 1930s.38 The part played by Sun’s ideological legacy
in the Communist revolution was not incidental. Motivated in part by political consider-
ations of undercutting the Kuomintang by appropriating Sun’s legacy for the Communist
Party, Mao Zedong’s idea of New Democracy formulated around 1940 was a Marxist
restatement of Sun’s Three People’s Principles. The strategy of development it outlined
consisted of a class alliance under the leadership of the Communist Party that would
oversee development through a mix of capitalist and socialist relations that would elimi-
nate ‘feudal’ forces, advance the forces of production, thus completing the task of ‘bour-
geois revolution’, and end up with the establishment of socialism when the conditions
were mature. The programme was not significantly different from the programme that
had guided the Kuomintang–Communist alliance of the 1920s except in leadership, and
was traceable in its outlines to Sun’s programme of socialism first enunciated in the years
before 1911. The appropriation was not just strategic. The victory of the Communist
Party in 1949 was the victory not of socialism, which lay in the future, but of New
Democracy. Interrupted by the speedier rush to socialism and communism for two
decades after 1956, the programme of New Democracy would return after 1978 with
reform and opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Its legacy continues to be visible both
in the achievements and the contradictions of contemporary China as socialist aspira-
tions grate against capitalist realities.39 At the same time, while some of the goals of late
Qing revolutionaries have been realized, other equally important ones remain to be ful-
filled. The Communist Revolution has brought to China the national ‘wealth and power’
that has been a fundamental goal of revolutionaries since the late Qing dynasty. It has so
far fallen short of other, equally important, goals that the 1911 Revolution put on the
political agenda. Among those goals is citizens’ rights, which has been a driving force of
revolution for over a century. Until those goals, too, have been achieved, the revolution
will remain unfinished.40
On this 100th anniversary, assessments of the successes and failures of the 1911
Revolution must be informed by criteria that differ not only from those that shaped his-
torical interpretation until just recently but also from those that drove revolutionaries in
China and elsewhere for generations. Despite the seeming rejuvenation of revolution in
the current ferment in North Africa, Western Asia, and perhaps other parts of Asia, ours

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 225

is a post-revolutionary age that has broken with the temporalities of Euromodernity that
informed revolutions for two centuries. The very idea of progress without which revolu-
tion is deprived of meaningful judgement has been called into question in the reassertion
of pasts once condemned to oblivion. The authoritarian model of successful develop-
ment that has brought China a new round of ‘wealth and power’, in the process rejuve-
nating the native ‘traditions’ revolutionaries had challenged, is held forth by some as a
substitute for revolution and the harbinger of an alternative future, not just for China but
for others as well. Chinese society today is a radically different society than it was a
century ago. It is also closer than could have been imagined until only recently to pasts
that the revolutionaries sought to overthrow in the name of progress.

Notes
  1. Sharon LaFraniere, China cancels academic debate, New York Times, 10 April 2011.
  2. Joseph W. Esherick, 1911: A review, Modern China 2(2), 1976: 141.
  3. Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and
Hubei, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, 258–9.
 4. Zhang Kaiyuan, A general review of the study of the revolution of 1911 in the People’s
Republic of China, Journal of Asian Studies 39(3), 1980: 525. An overview of commemora-
tions of 1911 in China, invariably convened in Wuhan, is provided in Yan Changhong, Xinhai
geming yu ershi shiji Zhongguo shehui (The Xinhai Revolution and 20th-century Chinese
society), Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2008, 1–15
  5. For a study of Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Revolutionary Party (Zhonghua geming dang),
see Edward Friedman, Backward toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
  6. For a discussion of Qu Qiubai’s analyses of the 1911 Revolution, see Liao Dawei, Xinhai
geming yu minchu zhengzhi zhuanxing (The Xinhai Revolution and political transformation
in the early republic), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2008, 319–36.
  7. This interpretation guided the monumental history of the revolution, Zhang Kaiyuan and Li
Zengping, Xinhai geming shi (History of the 1911 Revolution), 3 vols, Shanghai: Eastern
Publications Center, 1980, 2010. Their interpretation followed a path already set by ‘revo-
lutionary’ historians of an older generation. For works by prominent historians available in
English, see Wu Yu-chang, The Revolution of 1911: A Great Democratic Revolution of China,
Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964; Lu Bowei and Wang Guoping, The Revolution of
1911: Turning Point in Chinese History, ed. Dong Caishi, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
1991; Hu Sheng et al., The 1911 Revolution: A Retrospective after 70 Years, Beijing: New
World Press, 1981.
  8. For ‘New Democracy’, see Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 2, Beijing: Foreign Languages
Press, 1965, 359–88. See also Arif Dirlik, Mao Zedong and Chinese Marxism, in Arif Dirlik
(ed.) Marxism in the Chinese Revolution, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, 75–104.
An in-depth study of New Democracy in theory and practice is to be found in Tom Lutze,
New Democracy: Chinese communist relations with the urban middle forces, 1931–1952,
(PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1996). For Kuomintang discussions of Sunist
strategy in the 1920s, see Arif Dirlik, Mass movements and the left Kuomintang, Modern
China 1(1), 1975: 46–74. The relationship of New Democracy to the legacy of 1911 is
acknowledged in Zhang and Li, Xinhai geming shi, vol. 1, 6.
 9. See the history volumes in the series Putong gaozhong kecheng biaojun shiyanjiaoke-
shu (Experimental textbooks for ordinary high-school course standards), Beijing: People’s
Education Press, 2010, vol. 2: 78–81, vol. 3: 78–81, and vol. 4: 58–64. This last volume

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

226 China Information 25(3)

includes Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution in the section The Awakening of Asia, which
also includes the Indian and Turkish revolutions led by Gandhi and Kemal Ataturk respectively.
10. Esherick, 1911: A review, 141.
11. Liao, Xinhai geming, 157. The reference is to the emergence of party politics.
12. Ibid., 15–28, for the new consciousness of the citizen (guomin). See also Yan, Xinhai geming,
36–48. The seminal essay in the articulation of citizenship was Liang Qichao’s 1902 essay
Xinmin shuo (On the new citizen). For a discussion, see Philip C. Huang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao
and Modern Chinese Liberalism, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972, 64–7, and
Chang Hao, Liang Chi-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 149–219. A discussion with reference to the French
Revolution is to be found in Zhang Kaiyuan, The French Revolution and China’s 1911
Revolution, in Zhang Zhilian (ed.) China and the French Revolution, Oxford, UK: Pergamon
Press, 1990, 119–28. For more general discussions, see Joshua A. Fogel and Peter O. Zarrow,
Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1927,
Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997; Sung-chiao Shen, Discourse on guomin (‘the citizen’) in
late Qing China, 1893–1911, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7(1), 2006: 223; and Xin Yuan,
Gongmin gainian zai wo guo de fazhan (The development of the concept of citizenship in
our country), Faxue (Legal studies), 2004: 1–16. The relocation of the sacred in the nation
in nationalist ideology is an important argument offered in Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition, London:
Verso, 1995, ch. 2.
13. Dormant since the late 1980s, such questions have been resurrected by currently ongoing
upheavals in Arab societies.
14. We are referring here not only to those who identified with the old regime but also to resist-
ance among the people and intellectuals to the centralization of power and the extension
of state power into society at large. See Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; and Roxann Prazniak, Of Camel Kings
and Other Things: Rural Rebels against Modernity in Late Imperial China, Boulder, CO:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, Chinese edition, 2011.
15. Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming: Huiwang ershi shiji Zhongguo (Goodbye to revolu-
tion: Looking back on 20th-century China), Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1996, especially 65–
78 and 137–41. For a contrary view which insists that radicalism was a product of historical
development, including Qing policies, see Lei Yi, Zouxiang geming: Xishuo wanqing qishi
nian (Towards revolution: Examination of the last 70 years of the Qing), Taiyuan: Shanxi
People’s Press, 2011. For similar arguments focusing on the financial crisis, abolition of the
examination system, New Policies, etc., see the symposium involving Lu Jiande, Luo Zhitian,
Shen Weibin, and Others, Xinhai geming qiande Zhongguo (China on the eve of the Xinhai
Revolution), ifeng.com, 5 May 2011.
16. See, for example, Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives
of Modern China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, especially ch. 5.
17. Zhang Ming, Xinhai: Yaohuangde Zhongguo (Xinhai: Faltering China), Guilin: Guangxi
Normal University Press, 2011.
18. Royal heaven worship ceremony held to greet Lunar New Year in Beijing, English.xinhuanet.
com, 3 February 2011.
19. For brief accounts of the complex relations that went into the uprising on 10 October and the
part played by provincial representatives in the selection of Sun as president, see Jin Chongji,
Two issues concerning the Wuchang uprising, and Joseph W. Esherick, How Sun Yat-sen
became Guofu, in Etō Shinkichi and Harold Z. Schiffrin (eds) China’s Republican Revolution,
Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994, 53–63 and 129–52, respectively.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 227

20. John H. Fincher, Chinese Democracy: The Self-government Movement in Local, Provincial
and National Politics, 1905–1914, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981; and John H. Fincher,
Political provincialism and the national revolution, in Mary C. Wright (ed.) China in Revolution:
The First Phase, 1900–1913, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968, 186–226. See
also Chang P’eng-yuan, The background of constitutionalists in late Qing China, in Etō and
Schiffrin (eds) China’s Republican Revolution, 65–75.
21. Friedman, Backward toward Revolution.
22. Mary C. Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913, New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1968; Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical
Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1971. The complexities are captured cogently by a historian of Chinese politics: the
Revolution of 1911 was both an accident and the logical outcome of the revolutionary travail
of Sun Yat-sen and his party; Ch’ien Tuan-sheng, The Government and Politics of China,
1912–1949, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 57.
23. Lu Jiande et al., Xinhai geming qiande Zhongguo; Prazniak, Of Camel Kings; Fincher,
Chinese Democracy.
24. Gilbert Rozman, Theories of modernization and theories of revolution: China and Russia, in
Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo (Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica)
(ed.) Zhongguo xiandaihua lunwenji (Collected essays on China’s modernization), Taipei:
Academia Sinica, 1991, 633–46. For an alternative view, see Charles Tilly, Does moderni-
zation breed revolution?, Comparative Politics 5(3), 1973: 425–47. That modernization
breeds disorder was the argument of Samuel Huntington’s influential work, which formed
the inspiration for so-called ‘new authoritarianism’. See Samuel P. Huntington, Political
Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. For new authori-
tarianism, see Stanley Rosen and Gary Zou (eds) The Chinese debate on the new authori-
arianism, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 23(2), Winter 1990–1991, 3–7; and Stephen
J. King, The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2009.
25. Edward A. McCord, Warlords against warlordism: The politics of anti-militarism in early
twentieth-century China, Modern Asian Studies 30(4), 1996: 795–827, 806–9. Zhang Xun col-
laborated with Kang Youwei in the effort to restore the last Emperor, Pu Yi, to the throne in 1917.
26. Prazniak, Of Camel Kings.
27. Kishimoto Mio and Joshua A. Fogel, Social turbulence and local autonomy: Japanese histo-
rians interpret Chinese social groupings, Late Imperial China 30(1), 2009: 119–50. See also
Roger Thompson, Statecraft and self-government: Competing visions of community and state
in late imperial China, Modern China 14(2), 1988: 188–221; and Zhongping Chen, Beneath
the republican revolution, beyond revolutionary politics: Elite associations and social trans-
formation in lower Yangzi towns, 1903–1912, Late Imperial China 28(1), 2007: 92–127.
28. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols
in Republican China, 1911–1929, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
29. Joan Judge, Public opinion and the new politics of contestation in the late Qing, Modern
China 20(1), 1994: 64–91.
30. Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
31. Yen-ching Hwang, Overseas Chinese and the Republican Revolution of 1911, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976; Lea E. Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis
of the Pan-Chinese Movement in Indonesia, 1900–1916, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960;
L. Eve Armentrout Ma, Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns: Chinese Politics in
the Americas and the 1911 Revolution, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

228 China Information 25(3)

32. Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration
between the United States and South China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
33. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1980, 105–20, 109. Gramsci
equates ‘passive revolution’ with a ‘“revolution” without a “revolution”’ (p. 59) as well as
with ‘revolution/restoration’ (p. 109). Three decades later, New Democracy would appear as
another ‘passive revolution’, this time the progressive forces undertaking to carry to conclu-
sion the historical mission of the class they sought to replace. The fundamental point is the
dialectical relationship between revolution/restoration where classes are too weak by them-
selves to carry out the revolution
34. The classic revolutionary discussion of this complexity, and its consequences for revolution,
would be offered by Mao Zedong a decade and a half later in his 1926 essay, Analysis of the
classes in Chinese society, in Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 1, 13–21.
35. Benjamin I. Schwartz, Introduction, in Benjamin I. Schwartz (ed.), Reflections on the May
Fourth Movement: A Symposium, Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Monographs, 1972,
1–13. For an approach to the 1911 Revolution along these lines, see Lei, Zouxiang geming.
Lei’s work is organized around a number of dates on the way to 1911: 1840, 1851, 1863,
1875, 1898, and 1911.
36. Revolution as a process of learning from ‘failures’ was an underlying theme of another impor-
tant work on the Chinese Revolution, Angus W. McDonald Jr, The Urban Origins of Rural
Revolution: Elites and Masses in Hunan Province, China, 1911–1927, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1978.
37. Yu Keping, Democracy Is a Good Thing: Essays on Politics, Society, and Culture in
Contemporary China, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009, ch. 12.
38. Li Gongzhong, Zhongshan ling: Yige xiandai zhengzhi fuhaode dansheng (Sun Yat-sen
Mausoleum: The making of a political symbol in modern China), Beijing: Social Science
Documentation Press, 2009, ch. 6, from ‘Eternal Leader’ to ‘Father of the Nation’.
39. See the works cited in footnote 8. See also Huang Zhigao, Sanmin zhuyi yu Makesi zhuyi
Zhongguohua (The three people’s principles and the making of Chinese Marxism), Hefei:
Anhui University Press, 2010.
40. For further discussion, see Arif Dirlik, Colonialism, revolution, development: A historical
perspective on citizenship in political struggles in eastern Asia, Development and Society
39(2), 2010: 187–210.

References
Anderson, Benedict (1995) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso.
Chang, Hao (1971) Liang Chi-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Chang, P’eng-yuan (1994) The background of constitutionalists in late Qing China. In: Etō,
Shinkichi and Schiffrin, Harold Z. (eds) China’s Republican Revolution. Tokyo: University of
Tokyo Press, 65–75.
Chen, Zhongping (2007) Beneath the republican revolution, beyond revolutionary politics: Elite
associations and social transformation in lower Yangzi towns, 1903–1912. Late Imperial
China 28(1): 92–127.
Ch’ien, Tuan-sheng (1970) The Government and Politics of China, 1912–1949. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Dirlik, Arif (1975) Mass movements and the left Kuomintang. Modern China 1(1): 46–74.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 229

Dirlik, Arif (1991) Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dirlik, Arif (2005) Mao Zedong and Chinese Marxism. In: Dirlik, Arif (ed.) Marxism in the Chinese
Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 75–104.
Dirlik, Arif (2010) Colonialism, revolution, development: A historical perspective on citizenship
in political struggles in eastern Asia. Development and Society 39(2): 187–210.
Duara, Prasenjit (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern
China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Esherick, Joseph W. (1976) 1911: A review. Modern China 2(2), 1976: 141–84.
Esherick, Joseph W. (1976) Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and
Hubei. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Esherick, Joseph W. (1994) How Sun Yat-sen became Guofu. In: Etō, Shinkichi and Schiffrin,
Harold Z. (eds) China’s Republican Revolution. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 129–52.
Etō, Shinkichi and Schiffrin, Harold Z. (eds) (1994) China’s Republican Revolution. Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press.
Fincher, John H. (1968) Political provincialism and the national revolution. In: Wright, Mary C.
(ed.) China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 186–226.
Fincher, John H. (1981) Chinese Democracy: The Self-government Movement in Local, Provincial
and National Politics, 1905–1914. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Fogel, Joshua A. and Zarrow, Peter O. (1997) Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the
Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1927. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Friedman, Edward (1974) Backward toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gramsci, Antonio (1980) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. New York: International Publishers.
Harrison, Henrietta (2000) The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Sym-
bols in Republican China, 1911–1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hsu, Madeline Y. (2000) Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration
between the United States and South China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hu, Sheng, Liu, Danian, and Others (1981) The 1911 Revolution: A Retrospective after 70 Years.
Beijing: New World Press.
Huang, Philip C. (1972) Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Huang, Zhigao (2010) Sanmin zhuyi yu Makesi zhuyi Zhongguohua (The three people’s principles
and the making of Chinese Marxism). Hefei: Anhui University Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Hwang, Yen-ching (1976) Overseas Chinese and the Republican Revolution of 1911. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Jin, Chongji (1994) Two issues concerning the Wuchang Uprising. In: Etō, Shinkichi and Schif-
frin, Harold Z. (eds) China’s Republican Revolution. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 53–63.
Judge, Joan (1994) Public opinion and the new politics of contestation in the late Qing. Modern
China 20(1): 64–91.
Karl, Rebecca (2002) Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
King, Stephen J. (2009) The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Kishimoto, Mio and Fogel, Joshua A. (2009) Social turbulence and local autonomy: Japanese his-
torians interpret Chinese social groupings. Late Imperial China 30(1): 119–50.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

230 China Information 25(3)

LaFraniere, Sharon (2011) China cancels academic debate, New York Times, 10 April.
Lei, Yi (2011) Zouxiang geming: Xishuo wanqing qishi nian (Towards revolution: Examination of
the last 70 years of the Qing). Taiyuan: Shanxi People’s Press.
Li, Gongzhong (2009) Zhongshan ling: Yige xiandai zhengzhi fuhaode dansheng (Sun Yat-sen
Mausoleum: The making of a political symbol in modern China). Beijing: Social Science
Documentation Press.
Li, Zehou and Liu, Zaifu (1996) Gaobie geming: Huiwang ershi shiji Zhongguo (Goodbye to revo-
lution: Looking back on 20th-century China). Hong Kong: Cosmos Books.
Liao, Dawei (2008) Xinhai geming yu minchu zhengzhi zhuanxing (The Xinhai Revolution and
political transformation in the early republic). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.
Lu, Jiande, Luo, Zhitian, Shen, Weibin, and Others (2011) Xinhai geming qiande Zhongguo (China
on the eve of the Xinhai Revolution). ifeng.com, 5 May.
Lu, Bowei and Wang, Guoping (1991) The Revolution of 1911: Turning Point in Chinese History.
Ed. Dong Caishi. (ed.) Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Lutze, Tom (1996) New Democracy: Chinese communist relations with the urban middle forces,
1931–1952. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ma, L. Eve Armentrout (1990) Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns: Chinese Politics in
the Americas and the 1911 Revolution. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Mao, Zedong (1965) Selected Works. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
McCord, Edward A. (1996) Warlords against warlordism: The politics of anti-militarism in early
twentieth-century China. Modern Asian Studies 30(4): 795–827.
McDonald, Angus W., Jr (1978) The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution: Elites and Masses in
Hunan Province, China, 1911–1927. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Prazniak, Roxann (1999) Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels against Modernity in
Late Imperial China. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
Putong gaozhong kecheng biaojun shiyanjiaokeshu (Experimental textbooks for ordinary high-
school course standards) (2010) Beijing: People’s Education Press.
Rankin, Mary Backus (1971) Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai
and Chekiang, 1902–1911. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosen, Stanley and Zou, Gary (eds) (1990-91) The Chinese debate on the new authoriarianism.
Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 23(2): 3–7.
Royal heaven worship ceremony held to greet Lunar New Year in Beijing (2011) English.xinhuanet.
com. 3 February.
Rozman, Gilbert (1991) Theories of modernization and theories of revolution: China and Russia.
In: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo (Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica)
(ed.) Zhongguo xiandaihua lunwenji (Collected essays on China’s modernization). Taipei:
Academia Sinica, 633–46.
Schiffrin, Harold Z. (1968) Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Schwartz, Benjamin. I. (ed.) (1972) Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Monographs.
Shen, Sung-chiao (2006) Discourse on guomin (‘the citizen’) in late Qing China, 1893–1911.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7(1): 223.
Thompson, Roger (1988) Statecraft and self-government: Competing visions of community and
state in late imperial China. Modern China 14(2): 188–221.
Tilly, Charles (1973) Does modernization breed revolution? Comparative Politics 5(3): 425–47.
Williams, Lea E. (1960) Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the Pan-Chinese Move-
ment in Indonesia, 1900–1916. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

Dirlik and Prazniak 231

Wright, Mary C. (ed.) (1968) China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Wu, Yu-chang (1964) The Revolution of 1911: A Great Democratic Revolution of China. Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press.
Xin, Yuan (2004) Gongmin gainian zai wo guo de fazhan (The development of the concept of
citizenship in our country). Faxue (Legal studies): 1–16.
Yan, Changhong (2008) Xinhai geming yu ershi shiji Zhongguo shehui (The Xinhai Revolution
and 20th-century Chinese society). Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe.
Yu, Keping (2009) Democracy Is a Good Thing: Essays on Politics, Society, and Culture in Con-
temporary China. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Zhang, Kaiyuan (1980) A general review of the study of the revolution of 1911 in the People’s
Republic of China. Journal of Asian Studies 39(3): 525–31.
Zhang, Kaiyuan (1990) The French Revolution and China’s 1911 Revolution. In Zhang, Zhilian
(ed.) China and the French Revolution. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press, 119–28.
Zhang, Kaiyuan and Li, Zengping (1980, 2010) Xinhai geming shi (History of the 1911 Revolu-
tion), 3 vols. Shanghai: Eastern Publications Center.
Zhang, Ming (2011) Xinhai: Yaohuangde Zhongguo (Xinhai: Faltering China). Guilin: Guangxi
Normal University Press.

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OREGON on June 27, 2015

View publication stats