Cutting the Queue: The Last Qing Reforms, the First Nationalists, and the Revolution of 1911

Act I: The Bankrupt Court and the Local Elites (Review Question 1)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 416, 418. Reading-guide sentence (p. 416): "Forced to look after their own interests, local elites increasingly took on modernization projects."

The indemnity

The Boxer Protocol, signed on 7 September 1901, set an indemnity of 450 million taels, to be paid over thirty-nine years at four percent interest; with interest the total came to about 982 million taels. Ebrey calls the sum "450 million silver dollars" (p. 416), but the treaty set it in Haikwan taels, the customs unit of silver, so slides c and d say taels. Payments were secured on the Maritime Customs, the salt revenue and the native customs, and together with the service on the loans taken out to pay Japan after 1895 they absorbed the customs revenue entirely. Beijing therefore assigned quotas to each province, and the provinces raised them through surcharges on land, salt, liquor, pawnshops and trade. The new taxes fell on the same people the court was about to ask to support reform.¹

Local activism

Ebrey's point (slide e) is that fiscal weakness pushed initiative down to local society. Gentry and merchants founded schools, study societies, chambers of commerce (authorized in 1904), police forces, and railway and mining companies, and the number of periodicals rose roughly tenfold between 1901 and 1910. These men were what historians call the "reformist elite": examination-degree holders and merchants who wanted a stronger China and a larger say in running their own provinces. Esherick's study of Hunan and Hubei shows how the same men later dominated the provincial assemblies and, in 1911, steered the revolution in their provinces.

Their nationalism showed most clearly in the anti-American boycott of 1905 (slide f). The Gresham–Yang treaty of 1894, which accepted American exclusion of Chinese laborers, expired in 1904, and Washington refused Chinese demands for better treatment of merchants and students. Shanghai merchants called a boycott of American goods in May 1905; it spread to Guangzhou, Xiamen and the overseas communities and lasted, unevenly, into 1906. Ebrey also mentions the mistreatment of Chinese visitors at the St Louis fair of 1904, where the Qing had an official pavilion. Guanhua Wang argues that the boycott marks the first nationwide urban protest movement in modern China.² The rights-recovery movement, which raised money to buy back railway concessions from foreign companies, came from the same circles and would matter in 1911, when the court's plan to nationalize the Sichuan and Hubei railways set off the Sichuan railway protection movement in the months before Wuchang.

The court's reforms

The court's program of "New Policies" (xinzheng), begun with an edict of January 1901 issued from exile in Xi'an, went further than the reformers of 1898 had dared (slide g). It ordered new schools in 1901, added questions on foreign government and science to the examinations, and in September 1905 abolished the examinations outright. It reorganized ministries, created a ministry of education and a ministry of police, trained "New Army" divisions, and sent thousands of students to Japan. Reynolds has called the period a "Xinzheng revolution" because so much of the later Chinese state, from schools to police to law codes, was built in these years, largely on Japanese models.

The constitutional plan (slides h, i) followed Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905, which many Chinese read as a victory of constitutional over autocratic government. A commission of five officials went abroad in late 1905 (a revolutionary's bomb at the Beijing railway station delayed its departure), and on its return recommended the Japanese model of 1889, in which the monarch granted the constitution and kept sovereignty. In 1908 the court published an "Outline of a Constitution" and a nine-year timetable; Ebrey's "full constitution to be in place by 1917" (p. 418) refers to that schedule.

Then the leaders died (slide j). The Guangxu emperor died on 14 November 1908, aged thirty-seven, and Cixi the next day. Ebrey's "thirty-three-year-old" is an error; she correctly calls the death suspicious, and a forensic study announced in 2008 reported arsenic in his remains. Cixi had chosen Puyi, the son of Guangxu's brother Zaifeng, Prince Chun; Ebrey's "three-year-old" uses the Chinese count, and he was two. Prince Chun, as regent, dismissed Yuan Shikai in January 1909, officially because of a "foot ailment."

The provincial assemblies of 1909 (slide k) were elected on a narrow franchise: men over twenty-five with a degree, official experience, or property of at least 5,000 yuan. Fewer than one percent of the population qualified, but the assemblies quickly became platforms for the reformist elite. Their petitions for an early parliament, the third claiming 25 million signatures, pushed the court to shorten its timetable. The court's answer in May 1911 was the "princes' cabinet" (slide l) under Yikuang, Prince Qing: eight Manchus (five of them imperial clansmen), one Mongol bannerman and four Han Chinese. Edward Rhoads shows that this was part of a long effort by the regency to concentrate power, especially military power, in Manchu and imperial hands, and that it convinced many constitutionalists that the court would never share power.³

Act II: New Ideas from Abroad (Review Question 2)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 416–417. Reading-guide sentence: "Yan Fu argued that the Western form of government freed the energy of the individual…" The guide places this sentence on p. 417, but it is on p. 416; the deck cites p. 416.

The students in Japan

The number of Chinese students in Japan rose from a few hundred in 1901 to perhaps eight to ten thousand by 1905–1906, the largest movement of students abroad in history to that time (slide n). Most took short courses in law, education, police or military science. Japan was cheap, close and culturally familiar, and it offered a model of an Asian state that had modernized without being colonized. In Tokyo the students formed provincial associations and published magazines with titles like Hubei Students' Circle and Zhejiang Tide. Many cut their queues there. One of them, photographed in 1903 on slide n, was Zhou Shuren, who studied at the Kōbun Gakuin and then medicine at Sendai before turning to literature as Lu Xun. His story, and his "Diary of a Madman," return in Lecture 3.

Yan Fu and Social Darwinism

Yan Fu (1854–1921) studied at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, in 1877–1879 (slides o, p). His Tianyan lun (1898), a free rendering of T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics with commentary drawn from Herbert Spencer, put the vocabulary of "natural selection" (tianze) and "survival of the fittest" (shizhe shengcun) into circulation. He went on to translate Adam Smith, Mill and Montesquieu. Benjamin Schwartz's classic argument is that Yan read Western liberalism as a recipe for national "wealth and power": individual liberty mattered because it released energies the state could use.⁴ Ebrey's account (p. 416) follows this view.

Liang Qichao

From Japan, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) edited Qingyi bao (from 1898) and Xinmin congbao ("New Citizen," 1902–1907), the most widely read Chinese periodicals of the decade (slide q). His essays on the "new citizen" urged Chinese to think of themselves as members of a nation rather than subjects of a dynasty. His tour of North America in 1903 (he entered from Canada and spent several months in the United States) left him disillusioned with American politics and with the Chinese communities he met, and he turned toward "enlightened despotism" and the statism of Germany and Japan. Ebrey's "five months" is plausible but the deck avoids the exact figure. Hao Chang's study traces this intellectual turn.⁵

Zou Rong and anti-Manchu nationalism

Zou Rong (1885–1905) returned from Japan to publish The Revolutionary Army (Gemingjun) in Shanghai in 1903, with a preface by the classical scholar Zhang Binglin (slide r). Ebrey's "nineteen-year-old" is the Chinese count. The tract fused Social Darwinism with race: the Han were the "sacred" descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the Manchus an alien race to be expelled or exterminated. When the radical newspaper Subao promoted it, the Qing demanded the arrest of Zou and Zhang. Because they were in the International Settlement, they were tried in the Mixed Court; Zou was sentenced to two years and died in prison on 3 April 1905. The case made him a martyr, and his tract circulated in huge numbers. Rhoads argues that the anti-Manchu language of Zou, Zhang and the Revolutionary Alliance shaped what revolutionaries did in 1911 (Act IV).

Act III: Sun Yatsen (Review Question 3)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 417–418. Reading-guide sentence (p. 417): "Like Hong Xiuquan, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao before him, Sun came from Guangdong province."

Sun Yatsen (1866–1925) was born in Cuiheng village, Xiangshan county (now Zhongshan), to a farming family (slide t). In 1879 he joined his elder brother Sun Mei in Hawaii and attended the Iolani School and Oahu College; he was baptized in Hong Kong in 1883–1884. He graduated from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese in 1892. With friends there, the so-called "Four Bandits," he talked of overthrowing the Qing (slide u). In November 1894 he founded the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui) in Honolulu, and a Hong Kong branch followed in 1895. A plot to seize Guangzhou in October 1895 was discovered, and Sun fled to Japan, where, according to most biographers, he cut his queue and adopted Western dress late that year; Ebrey dates this to 1896. In October 1896 the Qing legation in London kidnapped him; his release after British press and government pressure made him internationally famous.⁶

The Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui), founded in Tokyo on 20 August 1905, merged Sun's following with student groups such as Huang Xing's China Revival Society from Hunan (slide v). Its oath pledged to "expel the Tartar caitiffs, restore China, establish a republic, and equalize land rights." Its journal Minbao debated Liang's Xinmin congbao over reform or revolution. The Alliance sponsored a series of risings in the south, culminating in the Guangzhou rising of 27 April 1911, whose dead were later honored as the "Seventy-Two Martyrs" (slide y). Funding came from overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Americas. Bergère stresses that Sun's real talent was as a fundraiser and publicist; the Alliance's organization inside China was weak, and the decisive work of recruiting New Army soldiers in Hubei was done by local groups such as the Literary Society and the Progressive Association, only loosely tied to Sun.

The Three People's Principles (slide w) and the theory of tutelage (slide x) appear in outline in the Alliance's program of 1905–1906, which laid out three stages: military government, a period of provisional constitutional rule, and full constitutional government. Sun later developed both ideas at length in the 1920s. Ebrey's definitions are accurate. The deck invites students to ask the obvious question about tutelage, who decides when the people are ready; the Nationalist government after 1928 used the doctrine to justify one-party rule.

Act IV: 1911

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 418–419.

Wuchang and the provinces

On 9 October 1911 a bomb exploded by accident in a revolutionary workshop in the Russian concession of Hankou, apparently while Sun Wu of the Progressive Association was assembling explosives (slide b). Police seized membership lists, and three men were executed the next morning. On the evening of 10 October soldiers of the Eighth Engineer Battalion in Wuchang mutinied, other units joined, and the governor-general, Ruicheng, fled. The rebels pressed the brigade commander Li Yuanhong to head the Hubei Military Government. Over the following weeks, provincial assemblies and New Army officers led one province after another to declare independence (slide aa). Esherick's argument is that in Hunan and Hubei the reformist elite quickly took control and kept social order, so that 1911 was less a popular revolution than a transfer of power to provincial elites. Sun Yatsen learned of the rising from a newspaper in Denver, Colorado.

The killings of Manchus

This section is fuller than the slide (slide bb), because the subject is not in Ebrey and is not widely taught.

Who the victims were. In 1911 most Manchus outside Beijing and Manchuria lived as hereditary members of the Eight Banners in walled garrison quarters ("Manchu cities") inside a dozen or so provincial cities, a pattern set after the conquest of the 1640s (Chapter 16, Lecture 2). They lived on dwindling state stipends, were barred from most trades, and could be identified by where they lived, by their Beijing-style speech, by their names, and in the case of women by dress, hairstyle and unbound feet.

Why it happened. Revolutionary propaganda since 1903 had cast the Manchus as an alien race. Zou Rong called for wiping out "the five million barbarian Manchus"; the Alliance's oath spoke of expelling the "Tartar caitiffs." Rhoads concludes that this rhetoric was "no mere rhetorical flourish": in several cities revolutionary soldiers acted on it. Fear also played a part, since garrisons were armed and could resist, and in some places the banner troops did fight.

Wuchang, 10–13 October. According to Rhoads, the rallying cry of the mutiny was "Slay the Manchu officials and the banner people!" and the Military Government's early proclamations spoke of "elevating the Han and exterminating the Manchus." On 12 October soldiers searched the city for Manchus, using a shibboleth: suspects had to say "six hundred sixty-six" (liubailiushiliu), which Beijing-speaking Manchus pronounced differently from local people (the account comes from the memoir of Li Lianfang, cited by Rhoads). A representative of the Military Government put the number of banner people killed in the first three days at 400 to 500; a Reuters correspondent estimated 800; the revolutionary participant Cao Yabo recorded 400 banner soldiers killed and 300 detained. The killing stopped on 13 October, after the foreign consuls in Hankou protested. Esherick writes that the violence in Wuchang "approached racial slaughter."

Xi'an, 22–25 October. The worst violence came in Xi'an, which had one of the largest garrisons, perhaps 20,000 people. Revolutionary troops rose on 22 October; the walled Manchu quarter resisted and fell on the 24th, after which there was indiscriminate killing. Many banner families killed themselves; the garrison general, Wenrui, drowned himself in a well. The British Baptist missionary J. C. Keyte, who was in the city, wrote of "not less than ten thousand" Manchus "who were either killed or took their own lives." Keyte's account is an outsider's report, written for a Western readership, and should be weighed with others: Japanese consular intelligence put the dead at about 4,000 to 5,000 out of some 6,000 in the quarter, and a later study by the Academia Sinica gave figures of 2,000 or 5,000. Rhoads notes that if the garrison numbered 20,000, Keyte's figure would mean half perished. Surviving girls were taken as servants and young women as wives.

Other cities. Rhoads lists violence on a smaller scale at Taiyuan (29 October, some twenty to twenty-five killed), at Zhenjiang (after 7 November, twenty to thirty killed, then expulsions), at Fuzhou (8–10 November, heavy fighting and suicides, followed by leniency), and at Nanjing (after its capture on 2–3 December, an "incalculable number" killed, much of it by troops under Su Liangbi). Jingzhou was besieged for about a month with heavy losses but surrendered without a massacre. Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Yili came through with little bloodshed, often because local gentry negotiated a surrender. Beijing and Manchuria, where perhaps two-thirds of all banner people lived, were spared. The Manchu official Duanfang, leading troops into Sichuan, was killed by his own mutinous soldiers at Zizhou on 27 November.

How historians treat it. Rhoads observes that the anti-Manchu violence "has been minimized in nearly all the retrospective accounts," both in Chinese histories that celebrate 1911 and in Western ones that stress its moderation. He concludes that in the places where it occurred, banner people "were essentially victims of genocide." Not every historian uses that word, and the death tolls are uncertain; but the killings themselves are well documented in Chinese, Japanese and Western sources. Monica Kin Ian Chang's recent doctoral research on "ethnoracial violence" in 1911 extends the picture. Pamela Crossley's Orphan Warriors follows one Hangzhou banner family through the end of the garrisons. After 1912 the republic adopted the slogan "five races in one republic" (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan), and many Manchus hid their identity for decades.⁷

The abdication

Sun Yatsen returned via Europe and was inaugurated provisional president at Nanjing on 1 January 1912 (slide cc). The court recalled Yuan Shikai, whose Beiyang troops retook and burned Hankou in early November and took Hanyang, then halted. Yuan negotiated with both sides. The revolutionaries, short of money and afraid of foreign intervention, agreed that Yuan would become president if he secured the abdication. On 12 February 1912 the Empress Dowager Longyu, Guangxu's widow, issued the edict in the name of the six-year-old Xuantong emperor, Puyi. Sun resigned, and Yuan was inaugurated as provisional president in Beijing on 10 March. In the cities, queue-cutting became the sign of the new order; Ebrey's photo caption notes that "soldiers often forced men to cut off their queues" (p. 419), and some men resisted or kept their queues for years.

Pierian Spring: Exiles, Armies, and the Boy Emperor

Reformers in exile (slide ff). Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao founded the Protect the Emperor Society (Baohuanghui) at Victoria, British Columbia, in July 1899. It built branches, schools and businesses across the Americas and Southeast Asia and competed with Sun for the same overseas Chinese money. Eve Armentrout Ma's study of the Chinatowns shows how bitter that competition became.⁸

Yuan Shikai's army (slide gg). As governor-general of Zhili (1901–1907) Yuan built the Beiyang Army to six divisions by 1905 and ran model reforms in police, schools and local self-government in Tianjin. Stephen MacKinnon shows how his network of officers and officials made him indispensable, which is why the court had to recall him in 1911.⁹

The abdication terms (slide hh). The Articles of Favorable Treatment let Puyi keep his title, an annual subsidy of four million dollars, his private property and the inner Forbidden City (with a promise to move later to the Summer Palace). Separate articles promised Manchus, Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans equality, protection of property and freedom of religion, and an eventual end to the banner stipends with provision for the banner poor. Puyi was briefly restored in July 1917 and was expelled from the palace by Feng Yuxiang in November 1924. Rhoads shows how unevenly the promises to ordinary Manchus were kept.

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. On the terms and the provincial quotas, see Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 1, and Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), ch. 1. The interest rate and total are those of the Protocol, art. 6. ↩

2. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001). Ebrey dates the boycotts 1905–1907 (p. 416); Wang's title gives the core period. ↩

3. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), ch. 3. Open access via the University of Washington Press (Manifold), DOI 10.6069/9780295997483. ↩

4. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). Later scholars have qualified Schwartz's reading, but it remains the starting point. ↩

5. Hao Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). ↩

6. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), chs. 1–3. Harold Z. Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), remains the fullest account of the early years. ↩

7. Rhoads, Manchus and Han, ch. 4, "The 1911 Revolution," section "Anti-Manchu Violence"; the Wuchang and Xi'an figures, the quotation from J. C. Keyte (The Passing of the Dragon, 1913), the Li Lianfang and Cao Yabo accounts, and the Japanese and Academia Sinica estimates are all as cited there. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China, on Wuchang. Monica Kin Ian Chang, "Recovering Lost Histories: Ethnoracial Violence in China's 1911 Revolution" (PhD thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2023). Pamela Kyle Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

   Instructor note: the deck gives only the ranges and attributes each number to its source. The online edition of Rhoads used here has no page numbers; cite by chapter and section. ↩

8. L. Eve Armentrout Ma, Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns: Chinese Politics in the Americas and the 1911 Revolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). ↩

9. Stephen R. MacKinnon, Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shi-kai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1901–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han (2000). The essential book on the Manchus in the late Qing and 1911, including the garrison killings; open access online.

Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China (1976). How the reformist elite of Hunan and Hubei made, and contained, the revolution.

Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (1993). The New Policies as a real revolution in institutions, built on Japanese models.

Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen (1998). The best modern biography, skeptical of the myth.

Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power (1964). Yan Fu's reading of the West.

Mary Clabaugh Wright, ed., China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913 (1968). Classic essays on the decade; Wright's introduction is still worth reading.

Pamela Kyle Crossley, Orphan Warriors (1990). One Manchu family from the Taiping war to the republic.