I've been working on a new TL. I hope you enjoy it .
In the early twentieth century Imperial China, ruled by the Qing dynasty since 1644, was in a poor state: its political structure was archaic, corrupt as well as inept in the face of foreign intrusion; its armies were obsolete; and technologically and economically the country had fallen behind on the rest of the world. China’s defeat in the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860) and the subsequent forced opening of treaty ports to uninhibited Western trade, the imposition of European extraterritoriality on foreigners living in China and the loss of tariff economy were the result. China’s weakness was demonstrated further by their difficulty in quelling the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), which ultimately cost 20 million lives, and other uprisings like the Nian (1851-1868), the Muslims of Yunnan (1856-1868) and the Dungan Revolt (1862-1877).
There were attempts to modernize such as the Self-Strengthening Movement, but they were hampered by lack of funds, lack of political will and an extremely conservative, xenophobic court culture. The limited effect of these reforms was shown when in 1894 China got into a conflict over control of Korea with Japan, a war that foreign observers fully expected small Japan to lose against the Chinese giant. Japan, however, proved that China was a giant with clay feet and that Chinese feudal society had to be modernized as well if technological and commercial advancements were to succeed.
In 1898, Emperor Guangxu was guided by reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao for a drastic reform in education, military and economy under the Hundred Days' Reform. The reform was a failure, as it was ended prematurely by a conservative coup led by Empress Dowager Cixi, supported by General Yuan Shikai. Emperor Guangxu, who had always been a puppet emperor dependent on Cixi, was put under house arrest in June 1898. Reformers Kang and Liang were exiled while Tan Sitong was executed by beheading (still a merciful death compared to the punishment of slow slicing, which was still in use at the time). Empress Cixi mainly controlled the Qing dynasty from this point on.
The Boxer Rebellion prompted another foreign invasion of Beijing in 1900 and the imposition of unequal treaty terms, which carved away territories, created extraterritorial concessions and gave away trade privileges. Under internal and external pressure, the Qing court began to adopt some of the reforms, but the Qing managed to maintain their monopoly on political power by suppressing, often with great brutality, all domestic rebellions. Dissidents could operate only in secret societies and underground organizations, in foreign concessions or in exile overseas. There were also criminal organizations that were anti-Manchu, including the Hongmen Zhigongtang and the Green Gang. The latter controlled criminal activities in all of Shanghai, including opium, prostitution and gambling and extortion rackets. Sun Yat-sen himself came in contact with the Hongmen as part of his anti-Qing endeavours.
And China was rife with such secret societies and underground organizations during the early 1900s, the most successful one of which was perhaps the Tongmenghui (United League). It was established in Tokyo in 1905 by Sun Yat-sen and was composed of the Revive China Society, the Huaxinghui and the Guangfuhui. While founded in Tokyo, it had loose organizations distributed across and outside the country, 90% of which consisted of youths aged between 17 and 26 upon foundation. Overseas Chinese actively funded such revolutionary activities, while many recruits were drawn from the newly emerging intellectual elite that the Qing ironically had helped to create: in 1906, after the abolition of the imperial examination system, the Qing government had established many new schools and had encouraged students to study abroad. From 1908, the Qing had also created bodies for the gentry and businessmen, which initially favoured the idea of constitutional monarchy. However, they became disenchanted when the Qing government created a cabinet with Prince Qing as Prime Minister in May 1911. By early 1911, an experimental cabinet had thirteen members, nine of whom were Manchus selected from the imperial family.
Since 1895, China had already seen at least sixteen major uprisings, the last of which was the Second Guangzhou Uprising (it ended in disaster, as only 72 bodies were ever found). In May 1911 the Qing government ordered the nationalization of railway lines, previously paid for by local private investors, in order to pay for the indemnities imposed by the Boxer Protocol. The announcement to nationalize the railways and pay back debts to the antagonistic victors of the Boxer Rebellion – mainly Japan, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, France and the US – was met with much opposition. Protests were held in Changsha and people in Guangdong boycotted government banknotes. By July the Qing government compensated the investors, but the amount offered to Sichuan was much lower than all other provinces. By August 11 there were massive strikes and rallies at Chengdu and Governor Zhao Erfeng, in a state of panic, ordered the arrest of the nobles. New Army units were stationed in Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang (which together formed the Wuhan tri-city) at the time.
On October 10th 1911 another uprising started in Wuchang organized by two local Wuhan revolutionary groups – the Literary Society and the Progressive Association – in collaboration with the Tongmenghui. An accidental bomb explosion seriously injured Sun Wu, the leader of the Progressive Association. When he was sent to the hospital the staff discovered the group were revolutionaries and alerted the Qing government. Facing arrest and certain execution with their identities now revealed the revolutionaries had no choice but to stage a coup. The modernized New Army units stationed there, while belonging to the Qing government, mutinied because they had been infiltrated by men sharing Sun Yat-sen’s anti-Qing allegiance. The revolutionaries took over the government house office of Viceroy Duan Zheng, who managed to avoid capture by escaping through a tunnel. After fierce fighting, the army captured strategic points in the city. More revolutionaries joined the insurrectionists and the government troops were defeated, after which a military government was formed in Hubei reluctantly led by the new Governor Li Yuanhong. By October 12th Hankou and Hanyang had fallen into the hands of the revolutionaries as well.
In the meantime, General Yuan Shikai had fallen ill in September with a kidney disease and couldn’t assume command of the Beiyang Army. With a troop strength numbering 75.000 men this was the largest and most formidable of the modern New Army units, and the outcome of the Xinhai Revolution in large part depended on if it would defect or not. By the time Yuan Shikai recovered enough to reassume command in January, the provinces south of the Yangtze River had all sided with the revolutionaries headed by the Hubei military government. Anti-Chinese revolts also erupted in Tibet, Mongolia and in Xinjiang, where ethnic violence took place against Han Chinese. Half the country was in hands of revolutionaries and separatists and the Xinhai Revolution was the worst threat to Qing rule since the Taiping Rebellion almost fifty years earlier.
Crucially, however, Qing forces had already retaken Wuhan and had established a beachhead on the right bank of the Yangtze River. Also, Britain and France had expressed their support for the Qing. The British and French saw the Qing as the best way to guarantee safety and stability and protect their interests rather than the disorganized, uncoordinated revolutionaries (which were often also anti-Western). So when Yuan Shikai took command in January 1912 he threw his lot in with the Qing, who offered him the position of Prime Minister. The Beiyang Army broke out of the beachhead, which the revolutionaries were trying to crush, and defeated their haphazard forces in the Battle of Nanchang on February 18th 1912. Rebel forces retreated to Changsha, where they were caught in a cauldron battle by Beiyang forces giving chase and other New Army units moving around the rebel flank. The standing rebel army was virtually annihilated in the Battle of Changsha on April 4th 1912 and the leaders of the revolution fled the country to avoid execution. By May the authority of the Qing had been restored throughout the country by a ruthless campaign of the Beiyang Army, but minor disturbances, uprisings and terrorist attacks would continue until early 1913.
In the meantime, with his forces doing mere mop up operations, Yuan Shikai energetically took steps to reform the country, largely to strengthen his own hold on power rather than to accommodate moderate reformists (although he did appoint Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei to his cabinet, which had no members of the dynasty in it). He had a constitution drafted for the country which was patterned along the German constitution, thereby giving a lot of power to the officers’ corps of the New Army, the estate owning land magnates, and the emerging business elites in cities like Shanghai. Yuan Shikai even introduced something similar to Prussia’s three-class franchise, in which the vote of a voter in a higher tax bracket had more value. Under his new tax legislation, one third of tax revenue was produced by the top 5% of the population, but their vote was worth twenty times as much as the votes of someone in the lowest of the three brackets. Additionally, the right to vote was reserved for men aged 25 and older in the hopes that barring young radicals from voting would bring about a more favourable composition of the new National Assembly (90% of the Tongmenghui’s original membership, for example, had been drawn from the 17-26 age category). Nonetheless, the people in the lowest bracket were so numerous that they were well represented in the National Assembly.
The National Assembly, however, was a rubber stamp institution – rather than the empowered Westminster-style body that many progressives would have liked – for two reasons. Firstly, it was very fractioned due to the large number of single issue parties, ethnic parties and provincial parties and Yuan was easily able to put them up against each other. Secondly, the National Assembly had no formal right to appoint or dismiss governments. Besides the National Assembly, an upper house known as the Council of State was formed which would act as a conservative check on the generally more progressive National Assembly. In theory it was half appointed by the Emperor, who was a 7 year old boy in 1913 with no influence. That left the appointments to Yuan Shikai since Regent Prince Chun at this point no longer interfered in politics because he understood the former held the dynasty by the balls. The other half was to be elected by the provincial assemblies, which were elected through a district based system gerrymandered in such a way that conservative landowners were overrepresented. Elections for the National Assembly would be held every four years and for the provincial assemblies, and thereby the Council of State, once every seven years. Elections for both were set in 1914 and they gave the Chinese electorate the illusion that the government was representing them rather than the generals.
In the end, Yuan Shikai became the effective military dictator of China with the Qing as powerless figureheads. It seemed Yuan Shikai’s actions would allow the Qing Empire to linger on for a few more years until the next revolt or until the generals decided to get rid of this Manchu relic on their own as the Chinese state modernized. Many still expected the dynasty to eventually fall because they had clearly lost the Mandate of Heaven a long time ago. Unlike the Qing, the military gained the support of the middle class by introducing a new imperial examination system in 1914. It tested on knowledge of law, economics, science, mathematics, engineering etcetera rather than Confucian classics, depending on what branch of government one wanted to enter. Also, sinecures, position that gave a salary for little to no work, were finally abolished like the Guangxu Emperor had tried to do in 1898. That was a great irony since at the time Yuan Shikai had conspired with Empress Dowager Cixi to overthrow him, but that was the nature of the opportunist with no loyalty other than to himself.
Then, however, a certain Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who most people in China had never even heard of, was shot dead by some radical in a faraway place in Europe called Sarajevo. The news didn’t make the headlines in any Chinese newspapers and some didn’t even mention it at all. The media were more concerned with upcoming elections or, alternatively, the exceptionally good rice harvest of 1914. In some cases the news that China had gone to war against Germany only reached the peasants in the countryside weeks later. And yet, the Great War would change China in more ways than anyone could have expected.
Qing Resurgent
Chapter I: The Xinhai Revolution and Imperial Reform, 1911-1914.
There were attempts to modernize such as the Self-Strengthening Movement, but they were hampered by lack of funds, lack of political will and an extremely conservative, xenophobic court culture. The limited effect of these reforms was shown when in 1894 China got into a conflict over control of Korea with Japan, a war that foreign observers fully expected small Japan to lose against the Chinese giant. Japan, however, proved that China was a giant with clay feet and that Chinese feudal society had to be modernized as well if technological and commercial advancements were to succeed.
In 1898, Emperor Guangxu was guided by reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao for a drastic reform in education, military and economy under the Hundred Days' Reform. The reform was a failure, as it was ended prematurely by a conservative coup led by Empress Dowager Cixi, supported by General Yuan Shikai. Emperor Guangxu, who had always been a puppet emperor dependent on Cixi, was put under house arrest in June 1898. Reformers Kang and Liang were exiled while Tan Sitong was executed by beheading (still a merciful death compared to the punishment of slow slicing, which was still in use at the time). Empress Cixi mainly controlled the Qing dynasty from this point on.
The Boxer Rebellion prompted another foreign invasion of Beijing in 1900 and the imposition of unequal treaty terms, which carved away territories, created extraterritorial concessions and gave away trade privileges. Under internal and external pressure, the Qing court began to adopt some of the reforms, but the Qing managed to maintain their monopoly on political power by suppressing, often with great brutality, all domestic rebellions. Dissidents could operate only in secret societies and underground organizations, in foreign concessions or in exile overseas. There were also criminal organizations that were anti-Manchu, including the Hongmen Zhigongtang and the Green Gang. The latter controlled criminal activities in all of Shanghai, including opium, prostitution and gambling and extortion rackets. Sun Yat-sen himself came in contact with the Hongmen as part of his anti-Qing endeavours.
And China was rife with such secret societies and underground organizations during the early 1900s, the most successful one of which was perhaps the Tongmenghui (United League). It was established in Tokyo in 1905 by Sun Yat-sen and was composed of the Revive China Society, the Huaxinghui and the Guangfuhui. While founded in Tokyo, it had loose organizations distributed across and outside the country, 90% of which consisted of youths aged between 17 and 26 upon foundation. Overseas Chinese actively funded such revolutionary activities, while many recruits were drawn from the newly emerging intellectual elite that the Qing ironically had helped to create: in 1906, after the abolition of the imperial examination system, the Qing government had established many new schools and had encouraged students to study abroad. From 1908, the Qing had also created bodies for the gentry and businessmen, which initially favoured the idea of constitutional monarchy. However, they became disenchanted when the Qing government created a cabinet with Prince Qing as Prime Minister in May 1911. By early 1911, an experimental cabinet had thirteen members, nine of whom were Manchus selected from the imperial family.
Since 1895, China had already seen at least sixteen major uprisings, the last of which was the Second Guangzhou Uprising (it ended in disaster, as only 72 bodies were ever found). In May 1911 the Qing government ordered the nationalization of railway lines, previously paid for by local private investors, in order to pay for the indemnities imposed by the Boxer Protocol. The announcement to nationalize the railways and pay back debts to the antagonistic victors of the Boxer Rebellion – mainly Japan, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, France and the US – was met with much opposition. Protests were held in Changsha and people in Guangdong boycotted government banknotes. By July the Qing government compensated the investors, but the amount offered to Sichuan was much lower than all other provinces. By August 11 there were massive strikes and rallies at Chengdu and Governor Zhao Erfeng, in a state of panic, ordered the arrest of the nobles. New Army units were stationed in Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang (which together formed the Wuhan tri-city) at the time.
On October 10th 1911 another uprising started in Wuchang organized by two local Wuhan revolutionary groups – the Literary Society and the Progressive Association – in collaboration with the Tongmenghui. An accidental bomb explosion seriously injured Sun Wu, the leader of the Progressive Association. When he was sent to the hospital the staff discovered the group were revolutionaries and alerted the Qing government. Facing arrest and certain execution with their identities now revealed the revolutionaries had no choice but to stage a coup. The modernized New Army units stationed there, while belonging to the Qing government, mutinied because they had been infiltrated by men sharing Sun Yat-sen’s anti-Qing allegiance. The revolutionaries took over the government house office of Viceroy Duan Zheng, who managed to avoid capture by escaping through a tunnel. After fierce fighting, the army captured strategic points in the city. More revolutionaries joined the insurrectionists and the government troops were defeated, after which a military government was formed in Hubei reluctantly led by the new Governor Li Yuanhong. By October 12th Hankou and Hanyang had fallen into the hands of the revolutionaries as well.
In the meantime, General Yuan Shikai had fallen ill in September with a kidney disease and couldn’t assume command of the Beiyang Army. With a troop strength numbering 75.000 men this was the largest and most formidable of the modern New Army units, and the outcome of the Xinhai Revolution in large part depended on if it would defect or not. By the time Yuan Shikai recovered enough to reassume command in January, the provinces south of the Yangtze River had all sided with the revolutionaries headed by the Hubei military government. Anti-Chinese revolts also erupted in Tibet, Mongolia and in Xinjiang, where ethnic violence took place against Han Chinese. Half the country was in hands of revolutionaries and separatists and the Xinhai Revolution was the worst threat to Qing rule since the Taiping Rebellion almost fifty years earlier.
Crucially, however, Qing forces had already retaken Wuhan and had established a beachhead on the right bank of the Yangtze River. Also, Britain and France had expressed their support for the Qing. The British and French saw the Qing as the best way to guarantee safety and stability and protect their interests rather than the disorganized, uncoordinated revolutionaries (which were often also anti-Western). So when Yuan Shikai took command in January 1912 he threw his lot in with the Qing, who offered him the position of Prime Minister. The Beiyang Army broke out of the beachhead, which the revolutionaries were trying to crush, and defeated their haphazard forces in the Battle of Nanchang on February 18th 1912. Rebel forces retreated to Changsha, where they were caught in a cauldron battle by Beiyang forces giving chase and other New Army units moving around the rebel flank. The standing rebel army was virtually annihilated in the Battle of Changsha on April 4th 1912 and the leaders of the revolution fled the country to avoid execution. By May the authority of the Qing had been restored throughout the country by a ruthless campaign of the Beiyang Army, but minor disturbances, uprisings and terrorist attacks would continue until early 1913.
In the meantime, with his forces doing mere mop up operations, Yuan Shikai energetically took steps to reform the country, largely to strengthen his own hold on power rather than to accommodate moderate reformists (although he did appoint Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei to his cabinet, which had no members of the dynasty in it). He had a constitution drafted for the country which was patterned along the German constitution, thereby giving a lot of power to the officers’ corps of the New Army, the estate owning land magnates, and the emerging business elites in cities like Shanghai. Yuan Shikai even introduced something similar to Prussia’s three-class franchise, in which the vote of a voter in a higher tax bracket had more value. Under his new tax legislation, one third of tax revenue was produced by the top 5% of the population, but their vote was worth twenty times as much as the votes of someone in the lowest of the three brackets. Additionally, the right to vote was reserved for men aged 25 and older in the hopes that barring young radicals from voting would bring about a more favourable composition of the new National Assembly (90% of the Tongmenghui’s original membership, for example, had been drawn from the 17-26 age category). Nonetheless, the people in the lowest bracket were so numerous that they were well represented in the National Assembly.
The National Assembly, however, was a rubber stamp institution – rather than the empowered Westminster-style body that many progressives would have liked – for two reasons. Firstly, it was very fractioned due to the large number of single issue parties, ethnic parties and provincial parties and Yuan was easily able to put them up against each other. Secondly, the National Assembly had no formal right to appoint or dismiss governments. Besides the National Assembly, an upper house known as the Council of State was formed which would act as a conservative check on the generally more progressive National Assembly. In theory it was half appointed by the Emperor, who was a 7 year old boy in 1913 with no influence. That left the appointments to Yuan Shikai since Regent Prince Chun at this point no longer interfered in politics because he understood the former held the dynasty by the balls. The other half was to be elected by the provincial assemblies, which were elected through a district based system gerrymandered in such a way that conservative landowners were overrepresented. Elections for the National Assembly would be held every four years and for the provincial assemblies, and thereby the Council of State, once every seven years. Elections for both were set in 1914 and they gave the Chinese electorate the illusion that the government was representing them rather than the generals.
In the end, Yuan Shikai became the effective military dictator of China with the Qing as powerless figureheads. It seemed Yuan Shikai’s actions would allow the Qing Empire to linger on for a few more years until the next revolt or until the generals decided to get rid of this Manchu relic on their own as the Chinese state modernized. Many still expected the dynasty to eventually fall because they had clearly lost the Mandate of Heaven a long time ago. Unlike the Qing, the military gained the support of the middle class by introducing a new imperial examination system in 1914. It tested on knowledge of law, economics, science, mathematics, engineering etcetera rather than Confucian classics, depending on what branch of government one wanted to enter. Also, sinecures, position that gave a salary for little to no work, were finally abolished like the Guangxu Emperor had tried to do in 1898. That was a great irony since at the time Yuan Shikai had conspired with Empress Dowager Cixi to overthrow him, but that was the nature of the opportunist with no loyalty other than to himself.
Then, however, a certain Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who most people in China had never even heard of, was shot dead by some radical in a faraway place in Europe called Sarajevo. The news didn’t make the headlines in any Chinese newspapers and some didn’t even mention it at all. The media were more concerned with upcoming elections or, alternatively, the exceptionally good rice harvest of 1914. In some cases the news that China had gone to war against Germany only reached the peasants in the countryside weeks later. And yet, the Great War would change China in more ways than anyone could have expected.