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State and Society in Early Republican Politics, 1912–18

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Extract

The 1911 Revolution profoundly disrupted the mixture of bureaucratic power, cultural and religious symbolism, and force upon which the authority of the Qing imperial state had rested. Tacit agreements, shared assumptions and mutual interests defining balances between state and society could no longer determine political relationships. Thus the republican revolution opened the way for a long series of redefinitions, and changed the political contexts in which actions would take place. As knowledge of the early years of the Republic grows, so does appreciation of how actions were contingent upon unpredictable new circumstances.

Type
Reappraising Republican China
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1997

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References

1 Fairbank, John K., Reischauer, Edwin O and Craig, Albert M., East Asia: The Modern Transformation(Boston:Houghton Mifflin Co.,1965), pp.642–46;Google Scholar Chuzo Ichiko, “The role of the gentry: an hypothesis,”in Mary, Clabaugh Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913(New Haven: Yale University Press,1968), pp. 306308.Google Scholar

2 Tse-tsung, Chow, The May Fourth Movement(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp.16.Google Scholar

3 Young, Ernest P., “Politics in the aftermath of revolution: the era of Yuan Shih-kiai, 1912–1916,” in John, K. Fairbank (ed), The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 12, Republican China, 1912–1949, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983), p. 208; Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), ch.5; Marie-Claire Bergere (trans. Janet Lloyd), The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 This list leaves out workers and rural lower classes. They had sporadic local impact in some places. But workers were only beginning to take part in general political movements in the later 1910s, and peasant involvement really began in the 1920s.

5 The concept of unfolding comes from Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 11.

6 Bryna Goodman, “New culture, old habits: native place organization and the May Fourth Movement,” in Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh (eds.) Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992), p. 77 and passim; R. Keith Schoppa, “Contours of change in a Chinese country, 1900–1950,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1992), p. 778.

7 Andrew Nathan, “A constitutional republic: the Peking government, 1916–1928,” in Fairbank, Cambridge History, Early Republic, p. 267

8 Edward Friedman, Backwards toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 169, 178.

9 Li Chien-nung (trans. Su-yu Teng and Jeremy Ingalls), The Political History of China,1840–1928 (New York: D. Van Norstrand Co., 1956), pp. 272–310,352–394. For a summary on assemblies see Chang Peng-yuan, “Provincial assemblies: the emergence of political participation, 1909–1914,” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindai shi yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academica Sinica) No. 22 (1983), pp. 273–299

10 Young, “Politics” p. 208; Mary Backus Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), ch. 7.

11 McCord, Power of the Gun, pp. 195–200; Zhang Yufa, “Erci geming: Guomindang yu Yuan Shikai de junshi duikang (1912–1914)” (“The Second Revolution: military confrontation of the Kuomintang and Yuan Shikai”), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindai shi yanjiusuo jikan, No. 15 (1986), pp. 286–291; Ernest Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-kiai:Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 143–46.

12 Li Tajia, “Cong ‘geming’ dao ‘fangeming:’ Shanghai shangren de zhengzhi guanhuai he juezhe” (“From revolution to anti-revolution: Shanghai merchants' political concerns and priorities”), Zhongyuan yanjiuyuan jindai shi yanjiusuo jikan, No. 23, Part 1 (1994), pp. 239–282. Quotation from Shenbao is on p. 278

13 On state failure to support bourgeoisie and modernization, see Bergere, Golden Age, pp. 7–10.

14 Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 5,39,217–18. Helen Cbamcey, Schoolhouse Politicians: Locality and the State during the Chinese Republic (Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press, 1992), pp. 210–12, appears to draw on a generalized concept of cultural nexus in discussing relations of officials and town elites.

15 Franz Michael, “Introduction: regionalism in nineteenth-century China,” in Stanley Spector, Li Hung-chang and the Huai Army: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Regionalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), pp. xxxix-xliii; James E.Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912–1949 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), pp. 18–21.

16 Stephen R. McKinnon, Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shihkai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1900–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 10.

17 McCord, Power of the Gun, pp. 10–11, 82, 160–63, 205–207, 245–6, 267.

18 Allen Fung, “Center and province after Yuan Shikai: a study of Guangdong,1916–1919,” Papers on Chinese History, Vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Fairbank Center, HarvardUniversity, 1995), pp. 24–26.

19 Diana Lary, “Violence, fear, and insecurity: the mood of Republican China,“Republican China, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1985), pp. 55–63.

20 Lu Jianhong, “Yuan Shikai difang zizhi pouxi” (“An analysis of Yuan Shikai's local self-government”) Shixue yuekan. No. 4 (1991), pp. 59–61.

21 Hu Chunhui, Minchu de difang zhuyi yu liansheng zizhi (Localism and Federalism in the Early Republic) (Taibei: Zhongyang shuju, 1983), pp.24–31; Rankin, Elite Activism, pp. 249–250; R. Keith Schoppa, “Province and Nation: the Zhejiang Provincial Autonomy Movement, 1917–1927,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (1977), pp. 673–74.

22 Translated in R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 44. Bracketed words are my addition. On the accretion of national identity on to native-place identity see Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 46, 312–13.

23 Shao Qin, “Making political culture: the case of Nantong, 1894–1930,” Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1994, pp. 226–27, 294–300.

24 Young, “Politics,” p. 243; Nathan, “Constitutional republic,” p. 259.

25 Schoppa, Blood Road, pp. 34–37; Fung, “Center and province,” p. 20

26 Rankin, Elite Activism, p. 246; Mary Backus Rankin, “Managed by the people: officials, gentry, and the Foshan Charitable Granary, 1795–1845,” Late Imperial China, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1994), pp. 41–45. The conceptions of ambivalence and contingency are from Goodman, Native Place, p. 129, ch. 4 passim

27 See Diyi hui Zhongguo nianjian (The First China Yearbook) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1923), pp. 1543; Jiaowubu zongwuting tongjike (Statistical Section of the Office of General Affairs of the Ministry of Education) (comp.), 1916–1917 Zhonghua minguo diwuci jiaoyu tongji tongbiao (Fifth Compilation of Statistical Tables of the Republic of China, 1916–1917) (Beijing, 1917), p. 63.

28 Schoppa, “Contours of change,” p. 778.

29 Rankin, Elite Activism, pp. 15–16.

30 Caroline Reeves, “The changing nature of Chinese philanthropy in Late-Qing and Early-Republican China,” in Association for Asian Studies (comp.), Abstracts of the 1995 Annual Meeting (Ann Arbor, 1995), p. 47; Shirley S. Garrett, “The Chambers of Commerce and the YMCA,” in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner (eds.), The Chinese City between Two Worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 229–230.

31 On the Tianjin Chamber of Commerce, see Zhang Xiaobo, “Merchant associational activism in early twentieth-century China: the Tianjin General Chamber of Commerce, 1904–1928,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1995.

32 Ge Gongzhen, Zhongguo baoxue shi (A History of Chinese Journalism) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1955), pp. 178–181,230; Andrew Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), pp. 145–46.

33 Schoppa, Blood Road, p. 35. On this culture in Nantong, see Shao Qin, “Political culture,” ch. 7. On creating a different kind of civic society and culture defined by police and the Kuomintang in Shanghai under the Nanjing government, see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ch. 4, pp. 242–49

34 Paula Harrel Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), chs. 4–7.

35 Chow Tse-tsung, May Fourth Movement, p. 49; Goodman, “New culture,” p. 85

36 The larger numbers of students had still greater political significance from the May Fourth Movement onwards, but the effect in the early Republic warrants more study. On the 1920s see Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

37 Chen Duxiu “Jinggao qingnian” (“A summons to youth”), in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan jindai shi yanjiusuo (ed.), Wusi yundong wenxian (Materials on the May Fourth Movement) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1979), pp. 1–7

38 Arif Dirlik, “The New Culture Movement revisited,” Modem China, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1985), pp. 265–273, 289–296; Dirlik, Anarchism, ch. 2, pp. 126–28; Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 188–194, 21

39 Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Standord University Press, 1993), pp. 4(M4); Dirlik, Anarchism, p. 128

40 Chow Tse-tsung, May Fourth Movement, p. 188; Yeh Wenhsin, Provincial Passages, pp. 123, 129; R. Keith Schoppa, Chinese Elites and Political Change: Zhejiang Province in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 5–9, 76, 186–87.

41 The concept of repertoire, implying political theatre, comes from Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 75–78.

42 Min Tu-ki, “The Soochow-Hangchow-Ningpo railway dispute,” in Min Tu-ki, National Polity and Local Power: The Transformation of Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989), pp. 191–207; Rankin, Elite Activism, pp. 251–263.

43 Zhang Xiaobo, “Merchant associational activities,” pp. 395–400.

44 Bryna Goodman, “Locality as microcosm of nation,” Modern China, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1995), pp. 393–400, 403–05.

45 For increasing Japanese economic interests in China, see Shanghai shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo (Institute of History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences) (ed.), Wusi yundong zai Shanghai shiliao xuanji (A Selection of Historical Materials on the May Fourth Movement in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1960), pp. 3–50.

46 Huang Fuqing, “Wusi qianxi liuRi xuesheng de paiRi yongdong” (“The anti-Japanese movement of students studying in Japan on the eve of May Fourth”), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindai shi yanjiusuo jikan, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1972), p. 117; Chow Tse-tsung, May Fourth Movement, p. 79; Wasserstrom, Student Protests, pp. 43, 336 n. 41

47 Zhang Xiaobo, “Merchant associational activism,” pp. 418–425.

48 Huang Fuqing, “Anti-Japanese movement,” pp. 120–138; Chow Tse-tseng, May Fourth Movement, pp. 79–82

49 Schoppa, “Contours of change,” pp. 791–94; Chauncey, “Schoolhouse politics,”chs. 3 and 5.