China, 1895 to 1916, episode 7

Rebels, Students and Boycotters

Sun Yat-sen, a doctor from Guangdong, has been plotting the dynasty's overthrow since 1895, and for ten years nothing he tries works. The episode steps back to follow him from a botched uprising to a kidnapping in London and the founding of the Revolutionary Alliance in Tokyo, alongside a writer jailed for calling for revolution and merchants who refuse to buy American goods, and asks how much of the revolution's later story was really Sun's. It leans on scholars and foreign observers; the revolutionaries' own words are not yet in the sources.

Transcript

Last time, from Xi'an, the court announced that it would lead China's reform itself. Within a few years it had abolished the old examinations, raised a modern army in the north under Yuan Shikai, promised a constitution, and turned the whole country against opium. And in 1905, a doctor who had spent the ten years since a failed rising at Guangzhou travelling the world, preaching his new principles, arrived in Japan, among all those students. This time, we follow him. To do that, we have to go back to the year the war with Japan ended, and meet him properly. Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866, the son of peasants, in Xiangshan, a county of the Pearl River delta not far from Guangzhou. When he was thirteen, his family packed him off across the Pacific to live with his elder brother in Hawaii, and there he went to a Christian missionary school. The brother had gone out to Hawaii years before as a labourer, and done well enough to send for him. The boy came home speaking and writing English more comfortably than classical Chinese. Back in his village, so the story goes, he broke a piece off a wooden god in the local temple, to show it was only wood, and he had to leave for Hong Kong. There he was baptised a Christian. In 1887 he enrolled at Hong Kong's newly opened College of Medicine. One of his teachers there was a Scottish surgeon named James Cantlie, who became his friend. Remember that name. In Hong Kong, Sun and three friends talked revolution so openly that they called themselves the Four Bandits. Sun qualified in 1892, the college's first graduate, and set up in practice in Macao, and it was there that he fell in with the revolutionaries of Guangdong. His missionary schooling and the democratic ideas he had soaked up convinced him that if the Manchus were driven out, a republic would have to take their place. And Sun thought of himself, very consciously, as a southerner, heir to the south's old hatred of the Manchus, from the Taiping rebels to the underground brotherhood of the Triads. Look at what kind of man this was. His later rival, Kang Youwei, came from the same corner of Guangdong, but Kang had a perfect classical education and the highest examination degree. Sun had almost no literary credentials, and stood far closer to the margins of society. In the China of the scholar officials, a man like that hardly counted. And at first he tried the respectable road. He tried to interest top officials in schemes for reform. In the summer of 1894 he went north to Tianjin with a friend, Lu Haodong, carrying a long letter of advice for Li Hongzhang himself. China's strength, the letter argued, lay in using every man's talents to the full, making the most of the land, putting things to their best use, and letting goods flow freely. Li, on the brink of war over Korea, never received him. Being ignored, Sun turned to revolution. In 1894, back in Hawaii, he founded the Revive China Society, beyond dispute the first organisation set up to overthrow the Qing. The next year he opened a second chapter in Hong Kong. Its members were nearly all Cantonese, most of them emigrants, and a large share of them Christians. As his ideas won followers and became more widely known, officials came to see him as a dangerous man. Not, on paper, the men to bring down an empire. Then, in the uproar over the signing of the peace treaty with Japan, Sun and his supporters seized the chance to plan their first rising, at Guangzhou. Their idea was to capture the city of Guangzhou and found a republic for the province of Guangdong. Armed men were to come in from Hong Kong, and the whole scheme depended on a large body of men from Shantou joining the malcontents inside the city. Shantou was a port further up the coast of Guangdong, to the east. Revolvers were shipped in barrels marked as cement. The day chosen was the Double Ninth, an autumn festival when crowds came into the city to visit their family graves, and a few more strangers would not be noticed. And Lu Haodong, the friend who had gone north with Sun to see Li Hongzhang, designed a flag for the new republic: a white sun on a blue sky. But the authorities were on the alert. The imperial troops stopped the men from Shantou from ever joining the rebels inside the city, and the rising was crushed before it had begun. Lu Haodong was caught, refused to name his comrades, and was beheaded. Sun would call him the first martyr of the revolution. It was, in the end, a quixotic republican revolution, crushed with ease. In these years, the idea of a republic touched only a tiny part of the empire's people. Sun got away. He was refused refuge in Macao, and then in Hong Kong. The British in Hong Kong banished him from the colony for five years. He was a fugitive now, and the Qing put a price on his head. He went first to Japan, and founded another branch of his society at Yokohama. There he cut off his queue and put on Western clothes. For a Chinese man in those years, cutting off the queue was rebellion in itself: it said he was no longer the dynasty's subject. In time Sun learned to speak Japanese comfortably, and wore a neat moustache in the Japanese style of the day. Then, by way of Honolulu, he went to America, organising wherever he went a revolt of the Chinese people against the Manchus. And from America, he crossed to England.

He sailed from New York in September 1896, and at the start of October he reached London. There he looked up his old teacher. James Cantlie had come home from Hong Kong and lived in Marylebone, a few minutes' walk from the Chinese legation in Portland Place. It was the official home of the Chinese envoy, and the British police could not simply walk into it. In October 1896, Sun Yat-sen was taken prisoner inside it. It was a Sunday, the eleventh of October. Here the sources disagree. In the story Sun told the world, Chinese men fell into step with him in the street, chatting in his own dialect, and hustled him through the legation door. The legation always said he had walked in of his own accord. Either way, once inside he was shut in a room on an upper floor, while the legation set about arranging to ship him back to China. The man handling the affair was the legation's British counsellor, Sir Halliday Macartney, a Scot who had served China for more than thirty years, and had once run an arsenal for Li Hongzhang. In China, a rebel against the throne could expect to be put to death. Sun wrote notes begging for help and threw them out of the window, but they were found and handed back to his captors. He wrote later that he spent much of that time in prayer. Day after day went by. Nobody outside knew where he was. His only hope was the English staff, and he begged one of the servants to carry a message out for him. Then the legation's English housekeeper, who knew what was going on, sent Cantlie an unsigned note: a friend of his was locked up inside. In the end the servant carried Sun's own message to Cantlie as well. Cantlie went straight to work. He went to the police, to Scotland Yard and to the Foreign Office, and at first nobody believed him. So he hired private detectives to watch the legation day and night, so that Sun could not be carried off unseen. Then a London evening paper broke the story, and a crowd gathered in Portland Place outside the legation. Lord Salisbury was prime minister, and he was his own foreign secretary too. Moved by Cantlie's appeal, he intervened personally. On the twenty third of October the legation let Sun go. He had been a prisoner for twelve days. The legation had meant to make him disappear. Instead it had made him famous. And Sun knew exactly what to do with fame. He immediately published an account of his adventure, in English, and called it Kidnapped in London! It was typical of him. He was good looking and charismatic, a gifted public speaker at a time when public speaking was a new political art in China, and he had a flair for the dramatic. His friends saw something else as well. One of them wrote of "The transparent honesty of the man, his manifest patriotism, the simplicity of his character, the readiness to endure all for his country's sake, even torture and death." He stayed on in London for months, reading in the library of the British Museum, and it was in those months in Europe, he would later say, that he arrived at the ideas he would preach for the rest of his life. But London had taught him something else. From now on, agents of the Chinese government would haunt his footsteps wherever he went. From 1895 until 1912, death by violence was never far away from him.

So the famous exile went back to work, and went on failing. His revolts went on, year after year, with shifting strategies, allies and goals, and none of them worked. His base was Japan, where he found a ready audience among the growing numbers of young Chinese studying there, and real support among sympathetic Japanese. And from then until the revolution had actually succeeded, he was rarely on Chinese soil at all. He also had a rival for the same audience. In exile, Kang Youwei had founded the Society to Protect the Emperor, and with the emperor a prisoner in his own palace, Kang could easily argue that only constant vigilance would stop the conservatives at court from quietly doing away with him. In the Chinese communities of Honolulu or San Francisco, you might see Kang's men making soapbox speeches at one street corner and Sun's partisans campaigning for support a block away. Sun tried to bring the two camps together, and failed. His approaches to his fellow Cantonese Liang Qichao kept foundering on the same thing: to the progressive elites, Sun was not quite respectable. In the summer of 1900, with the north in flames, there was even talk, through go betweens, of Sun joining Li Hongzhang, then governor general at Guangzhou, to make the south independent. Li took the throne's summons and went north to make peace instead. So in 1900, under cover of the Boxer chaos in the north, Sun launched a second rising, at Huizhou in Guangdong. It too was crushed with ease. It was led on the ground by a Triad chief, and for about two weeks it held its own, while Sun waited across the water in Taiwan for Japanese arms. Then a new government in Tokyo forbade any help, and the rising ran out of ammunition and melted away. What Sun was really good at was money. His great talent was raising funds among the overseas Chinese merchants, above all the many thousands from Guangdong and Fujian with businesses around Southeast Asia, and to a lesser degree in the Americas and Europe. The Qing had long ignored and despised them. They cared about China's fate too, and perhaps they reckoned that a little support now might pay big dividends after the revolution. Sun bought arms abroad and smuggled them to the secret societies in China. Kang's society made its contributors the same kind of promises, and Kang was plotting to put the emperor back in Cixi's place. The so called secret societies were not usually very secret. They were gang like mutual aid brotherhoods, and their real business was gambling, extortion, prostitution, opium smuggling and theft. But in the disturbed conditions of the late Qing, they were sometimes ready for rebellion. Some of them still professed an old creed of overthrowing the Qing and restoring the Ming, though by now that was little more than a legend of southern China's old hatred of the Manchus. In Honolulu, Sun even joined one of those brotherhoods himself. His doggedness, his popularity among the overseas Chinese, and the respect he slowly won among foreign governments were real strengths. His ties to the secret societies at home were less clear. But while Sun was failing abroad, something was changing among the young. After the Boxer disaster, a classically educated schoolteacher, a conservative until then, announced his new principles: always support the people against the monarchy, students against teachers, and the young against the old. He was not arrested. He was not even fired. He was simply encouraged to go and continue his education in Japan. Part of this revolution was a story of fathers and sons: conservative fathers and radical sons fighting each other, and in the end staying loyal to each other. In Tokyo, the atmosphere among the Chinese students was tense and exciting. They were largely free to discuss anything, and the Japanese had already translated Western thinkers from Rousseau to Marx into a written language they could read. Even the conservative students could not help being amazed: big glass shop windows, streetcars, dozens of newspapers, railways tying the nation together, and a constitutional government that seemed to recognise the rights of the people. The young radicals came, as a rule, from gentry families, some well off, many from lines that had produced officials in the past. Either way, they had inherited a Confucian duty to save society. In Shanghai, a group of them founded a society expressly to stir up feeling against the Manchus, and through it an anti Russian society was set up among the students in Tokyo, which attacked the dynasty indirectly by protesting its policy in Manchuria. One of the students in Tokyo was a teenager from Sichuan named Zou Rong. In the spring of 1903 he and a few friends cornered a Qing official who supervised the students, a man caught up in a scandal, and cut off his queue. Zou had to get out of Japan. He came to Shanghai, to study at the Patriotic School. It had been founded by a group of radicals, a classical scholar named Zhang Binglin among them, to appeal to nationalistic students. It ran public meetings, discussions of Western political theory, and military drill for the students. Zhang was older than the students, a scholar of formidable learning from Zhejiang, and he had cut off his own queue in 1900. At that moment, Russian troops sent in to fight the Boxers were refusing to leave Manchuria, and the students demanded that the Qing do more to defend the northeast. That spring Zou published a short, furious book called The Revolutionary Army, with a preface by Zhang Binglin. "The people possess inalienable rights." So, Zou wrote, "If the government insists on corrupt ways, then it is not only the right but the obligation of the people to overthrow it, and set up a new government to protect their rights". "Take revolution as every man’s duty," he told his readers, and "consider it as necessary as your daily food." Kill the emperor, the Manchus and all the foreign oppressors, he urged, and in that bloodbath "the shame of the nation will be washed clean." It was reprinted again and again, and passed from hand to hand all over China. These men also wrote for the Subao, a daily paper in Shanghai, which in 1903 openly called for revolution. Zhang Binglin used it to carry on a running quarrel with Kang Youwei's reform, and in print he called the emperor a "little clown". A little clown, he added, who could not tell beans from wheat, the old phrase for a fool. In the empire, words like that were not an opinion. They were treason. The Qing, understandably, wanted to execute these men. But they were in Shanghai's International Settlement, protected, ironically enough, by British law. The International Settlement was the part of Shanghai the foreigners ran for themselves, through a council elected by the foreign residents, with its own police. So the Qing tried to lure two of them outside the Settlement, by inviting them to address a meeting. That did not work. In the end the British dominated council agreed that the Subao had at least insulted the sovereign, and it issued warrants for their arrest. And then something strange happened. The radicals were warned ahead of time, by sympathetic Chinese officials. The world of the educated that produced both officials and radicals was not all that large. And many officials who thought the radicals extreme still felt that their job was to help the government move forward, not to engage in repression. So officials who thought of themselves as loyal to the government's true interests were quietly colluding with radicals, many of whom were vague themselves about where protest ended and revolution began. Two of the group fled to Europe. Zhang Binglin and Zou Rong gave themselves up to the Shanghai authorities, once they had made sure they would be in the custody of the British, not the Qing. Zhang was arrested at the end of June. Zou could have got away. Instead, the next day, he walked into a police station and gave himself up. Then the court showed what custody of the Qing could mean. That July, in Beijing, a journalist named Shen Jin, who had leaked the terms of a secret agreement with Russia, was beaten to death with bamboo rods on the court's orders. The Qing demanded the prisoners, or at least that the Shanghai court execute them. The British saw their own legal position and principles at stake, and there followed long legal manoeuvring. After lengthy and very public negotiations, the two men were tried in the Shanghai Mixed Court. The Mixed Court was a Chinese court inside the Settlement, where a Chinese magistrate sat beside a foreign assessor. The Chinese judges urged life imprisonment. The two men got brief prison terms. Three years for Zhang, two for Zou. And the dynasty lost far more than the case. Chinese public opinion turned against the Qing. Even if the radicals looked extreme, the government had made itself look vindictive, incompetent and ridiculous. It seemed to be prosecuting sincere, if naive, young men not for treason but for their opinions about Russian aggression. In the court of public opinion, it was convicted of weakness twice over: in the northeast, and in Shanghai. A dynasty can survive being hated. Being laughed at is harder. In prison, Zou fell sick and died, and became a martyr. He died in the spring of 1905, a few months before his sentence would have ended. He was about twenty. Zhang Binglin came out in 1906, a hero. The case also widened the foreigners' reach in China. It was a chapter in the Settlement's rise to running itself, in practice, as an independent city, and for years to come it would be a safe haven where Chinese radicals could hatch their plans. For a while, closing down the paper, and Japan's discouragement of the students' anti Russian society, put a check on the movement. But it was not for long.

Meanwhile, back in China, something else was stirring. The Boxer disaster had left ordinary people bewildered in some provinces and sullenly angry in others, but it had stirred no new enthusiasm among them. Japan's victory over Russia did. It electrified the nation. And the first sign of this new sense of nationhood was a boycott of American trade. Since 1882, American law had shut Chinese labourers out of the United States. Merchants, students and travellers were still allowed in, but at the ports they were treated as if every one of them were a labourer in disguise: held, questioned and humiliated. A treaty of 1894, in which China had accepted the exclusion, ran out at the end of 1904, and China refused to renew it. Even Sun Yat-sen, landing at San Francisco in 1904 with papers saying he had been born in Hawaii, was held by the immigration officers, and got in only after an appeal to Washington. So the people of China took up the boycott, to strengthen their own government's hand in forcing the Americans to let Chinese immigrants in freely. The movement was started and encouraged from San Francisco, where the Chinese consul declared in public that the boycott had his government's support. The first warning came from Shanghai, in May 1905. That month Shanghai's merchants gave the Americans two months to change their ways. The deadline passed, and in July the boycott began. American cigarettes, flour, kerosene and cotton cloth were the targets. Who were these people? In the cities, merchants, gentry turned businessmen, and a new kind of gentry with modern schooling were merging into one development minded, business oriented class, more and more impatient with the old political system. Over the decade they were converted to nationalism by the old Shanghai daily Shenbao, and by a crop of new journals, among them one founded in 1904 as a mouthpiece for Liang Qichao and his fellow progressives. The new press reached a long way. In 1908 alone, some thirty six million copies of journals and books went through the post, not counting the copies sold on the street, or how many people read each one. The boycott was put into force at port after port: Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Hankou, Tianjin and Yingkou. It was most successful at Guangzhou and Shanghai, and it was at Shanghai that it had the most life in it and did the most damage. It brought together the defence of national dignity abroad, a new political press to orchestrate it, the idea of commercial warfare, and nationalist businessmen who saw a chance to give Chinese made goods an edge. Commercial warfare was a slogan of the day: the idea that nations fought each other through trade as surely as with guns. And along the way it worked out a whole repertoire of popular mobilisation: speechmaking, public rallies, and the taking part of professional and voluntary associations. All of it would be turned to many other purposes in the years ahead. A foreigner who watched it called it a great popular movement, engineered by the Cantonese in Guangzhou and San Francisco, and stirred up by the students of the new era, above all those who had studied in Japan. Notice who is in that sentence: Cantonese emigrants, and students who had been in Japan, the very people Sun Yat-sen had been courting. But remember why they had taken up the boycott: to strengthen their own government's hand, not to bring that government down. In Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered his officials to treat Chinese merchants and students with courtesy. The law itself did not change. The other foreign powers saw at once that all their interests were at stake. In Hong Kong and in Qingdao, the boycott was put down with strong measures, and the Japanese suppressed it at Yingkou. The Americans warned Beijing that China would be held responsible for any losses from this "conspiracy in restraint of American trade". So the imperial government issued peremptory orders against it, and told the American envoy it was "most anxious that the agitation should be at once stopped". At the head of the court's foreign affairs now was Prince Qing, the prince who had signed the Boxer peace beside Li Hongzhang. On the twenty sixth of August, at the height of the boycott, Prince Qing lost his nerve. He informed the American envoy that "the Chinese government assumes no responsibility for the boycott, that the movement was started by the traders, and that it has taken action as a proof of friendship". It wasn't us, we tried to stop it, and you're welcome. The man who did not lose his nerve was Yuan Shikai. In Tianjin, where he governed as viceroy of Zhili, Yuan stamped the boycott out. Elsewhere, governors and local officials put up strong proclamations, but even with the American threat behind them, the government's measures never fully worked. The court's strongest servant had looked at the first great popular movement of the new China and treated it as a matter for the police. Remember that, when crowds and Yuan Shikai meet again in this story. In the end it was not the government that killed the boycott. It faded away in September, because the Chinese traders who had bought American cotton cloth on long contracts found they could not sell it. When the traders began to agitate against the boycott, the boycott ended. Patriotism, it turned out, lasted about as long as a cotton contract. The exclusion laws stayed. But something had shifted in the way people talked. The old cry had been to save the country from being carved up. The new one was sovereign rights, a call to take back what had been lost: territory, and above all the mines and railways signed away to foreigners. Merchants and students all over China had learned how to fill a street, and they would not forget it.

Which brings us back to Tokyo, and to that summer when Sun arrived. By now some five to seven thousand Chinese students were studying in the city. Most were there on government scholarships, most came from gentry families that were not wealthy, and most were taking very short courses to qualify for a career in the army or the bureaucracy. Study in Japan was much cheaper than in America or Europe, the culture less alien, and the written language easier to read. One of the Hunanese student radicals was a man named Huang Xing. At Changsha in 1903 he had founded a revolutionary society of his own, and under his leadership it set out to build ties with student groups from other provinces. In November 1904 he had planned a rising at Changsha, timed for Cixi's seventieth birthday, when the province's officials would be gathered for the celebrations. It was betrayed, and he fled to Japan. Among those who fled to Japan after it was a young comrade named Song Jiaoren, who will matter a great deal later in this story. When Song openly rebelled against the government, the magistrate back home illegally protected his family from persecution. It was a sign of the times. Even conservative elites were losing much of their faith in the old order, and some of their nerve, and without that, no revolution gets off the ground. Huang's Hunanese wanted something bigger: one organisation that would join their own provincials with like minded students from Hubei, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Sichuan and the rest. In 1905 the student societies agreed to merge their different creeds and form a single new party. The Shanghai society was folded into it too. Japanese Pan Asianists, sympathisers of the cause, brokered the meeting, and all of them were fired by Japan's victory over Russia. Pan Asianists believed the peoples of Asia should stand together against the West, with Japan, as a rule, in the lead. At this moment Sun Yat-sen arrived in Japan, and a meeting held to welcome him became the occasion to launch the united party. It took place in Tokyo on the thirteenth of August 1905. Well over a thousand students crowded in to hear him, and more stood outside in the street. Sun had never trained in the classics, and at first he had little standing among the better educated students and the older radical scholars. But his commitment to the cause of driving out the Manchus won their respect. He had studied Western political theory, though he was never a leading thinker, and he had earned his laurels as something China had never had before: a professional revolutionary. A week later, on the twentieth of August, they met at a house in Tokyo and swore themselves into the new party. They called it the Tongmenghui, the United League. Each member swore to drive out the Manchus, restore China to the Chinese, found a republic, and make the rights to land equal. The new umbrella group, about four hundred strong, elected Sun Yat-sen its leader. It was Sun's alliance with the students that gave his revolutionary dream a new lease on life. Huang Xing took charge of its day to day work, second only to Sun. Sun's programme became his Three Principles of the People: nationalism, republican government, and land nationalisation, which he later called the people's livelihood, a vague sort of socialism. That November the League launched its own magazine in Tokyo, the People's Journal, and its first issue carried Sun's first public statement of the three principles. And when Zhang Binglin came out of prison in Shanghai in 1906, he went straight to Tokyo, joined the League, and took over the editing of its magazine. For the next two years it fought a running battle in print with Liang Qichao, still in exile in Japan, who argued that China needed a constitutional monarchy, and that a revolution would bring chaos and invite the foreign powers in. Liang's side played down the difference between Manchu and Chinese, pointing to how far the Manchus had taken up Chinese ways, and pinned its hopes on education and gradual change. The revolutionaries wanted a clean break. They called theirs a racial revolution, and demanded racial revenge for the Manchus' crimes against the Han. Han was the name the Chinese majority used for themselves, as against the Manchus, the Mongols and the other peoples of the empire. They even had their own calendar. Instead of counting the years by the reigns of emperors, they counted them from the Yellow Emperor, the legendary forefather of the Han, some four thousand years before. For the next few years the League clearly led the spreading of the gospel of republican revolution in China. Its members often took it for granted that once the Manchus were gone, the Chinese would soon put their own house in order, and all would be well. A handful went further still, into anarchism, dreaming of a world with no state at all, built on cooperation and mutual aid. Looking back, one foreign observer judged that with the birth of the League, almost half the task Sun had set himself was done. Revolution now stood on a broader footing. And from then on, the real work had to be done by the people at home, inside China. Sun was more a visionary than a practical politician, the same observer thought, but his great service was that whatever stood in his way, he never let his own enthusiasm or anyone else's weaken or die, if he could help it. His real claim to fame, that observer reckoned, would rest on the forces he organised outside China, and on the people he inspired, who unlike him were free to come and go inside it. There was a romance in being young and ready to die for the nation. Some killed themselves to wake their countrymen up. Some tried to assassinate officials. Others led armed risings. One of the League's most widely read pamphleteers, Chen Tianhua, took his own life. In December 1905 he drowned himself in the sea near Tokyo, in protest at new Japanese rules for Chinese students, and at a Japanese newspaper that had sneered at them as self indulgent. But the League began to split almost from the start: over who should hold which post, over when and where to rise, and over whether to keep leaning on Japanese and other foreign friends. In 1907 Sun and Huang Xing fell out over the flag itself. Huang wanted a new design. Sun insisted on the white sun on a blue sky that Lu Haodong had drawn in 1895, and Huang very nearly walked out. That same year the Japanese government, pressed by Beijing, asked Sun to leave the country, and eased his going with a gift of money. He left only a small part of it for the magazine, and Zhang Binglin, in a fury, tore Sun's portrait off the office wall. Other quixotic risings followed, one of them on the border between Guangxi and Vietnam in 1907, and they failed one after another. Sun crossed the border to be at that one himself, one of his rare moments on Chinese soil in all those years. By then he had become something of a laughingstock among a younger generation with revolutionary ambitions of its own. By late 1907 the romantic, student led phase of the revolution had largely burned out. The Qing authorities cracked down, with support from the Japanese government. A revolutionary named Qiu Jin, a firm champion of women's rights, was arrested and executed that year for plotting a rising, the first woman to die a martyr to the revolution. One of the radicals, Liu Shipei, announced very publicly that he had changed his mind: the best way to safeguard the heritage of the Han was to preserve the Qing empire, not destroy it. The students had put the idea of a republican revolution squarely on the table. But they had not made the revolution, and when it came, it would be led by others. So what was Sun Yat-sen, by now? He was best suited to serve as a propagandist, a broker between the other revolutionaries, and above all a symbol. His weaknesses were his low standing among the progressive elites at home, and at times a romantic naivety about the revolution he was trying to make. And he had plenty of competitors: revolutionary cells in one province or another, above all among the students and the New Army troops. As time went on, he probably became less the leader, except perhaps in name. He was still the great organiser outside China, but the men doing the work inside it needed him less, and his ties to the party grew looser. Yet the League kept growing, and by 1911 it claimed nearly ten thousand members. And it set out, deliberately, to win over the soldiers of the New Armies. And when the revolution finally broke out, Sun Yat-sen was in Denver, in the American West, raising money from the overseas Chinese. So whose revolution would it be? Sun's, the students', the soldiers', or the provincial gentlemen's who would sit in the new assemblies? That is a question the rest of this season has to answer. But before any revolutionary could strike, the dynasty took a blow that no revolutionary dealt it. In November 1908, the Guangxu emperor and Cixi died within a day of each other, and the throne passed to a child of two. His father, Zaifeng, the dead emperor's half brother, became regent. And within weeks, the regent turned on the most powerful man in the empire, Yuan Shikai. Next time: the regent's gamble, a promise of a constitution he meant to keep on the court's terms, and the question of whether the dynasty's own reforms brought it down.

Sources

• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume III: The Period of Subjection, 1894-1911 (1918), pp. 130-131, 433-435, 435-436, 436-438, https://archive.org/details/internationalre03mors
• Percy Horace Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (1912), pp. 11-12, 34-36, 36-37, 278-279, https://archive.org/details/cu31924021495258
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 31-32, 32-33, 48-49, 49-50, 53-54
• William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009), pp. 237-238, 255-257, 258-260, 269-271, 271-272, 274-275