Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution

Sun Yat-sen, an exile educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong, organized revolutionary movements aimed at overthrowing the Qing dynasty and establishing a republic. His Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, livelihood) shaped the modern Chinese political vocabulary. In 1911 a relatively minor uprising in Wuhan triggered the collapse of the Qing dynasty. The Republic of China was proclaimed in 1912. Sun briefly served as president before yielding power to the warlord Yuan Shikai.

China entered a period of warlord instability that would last until the unification under the Nationalists in the late 1920s.

Why China and Japan diverged: This is the central comparative question of Unit 10.4. Both China and Japan faced industrial Western pressure in the mid-nineteenth century. Japan responded with the Meiji Restoration, deliberately adopting Western technology and institutions, and emerged as an imperial power. China resisted modernization, partly because the Confucian elite was committed to traditional structures and partly because the Qing dynasty (itself a foreign Manchu regime) feared that reform would weaken its grip. The result was that Japan became a colonizer while China became a target of colonization. The Hundred Days' Reform was China's belated attempt to copy Japan; its failure sealed China's continued subjection.