The Crisis of China in the Late Qing Era

Revolutions rarely occur at the moment of greatest hardship or at the point of severest oppression, but rather when conditions are beginning to improve, when hope is kindled and the prospect of a better world can be glimpsed – when change seems possible but is neither adequate nor sufficiently fast. So it was in France in 1789; so it was in China in 1911. During the last years of the Dowager Empress Cixi there had been numerous attempts to reform backward, corrupt, semi-feudal conditions; in education, industry, taxation, government and the military there had been reforms and modernization – small sometimes grudging improvements, but progress nonetheless. These reforms, however, merely whetted the appetite for more extensive changes and, instead of being regarded as the first steps along a path of reconstruction, merely led to cries for far greater and more immediate changes – changes that first engulfed the Qing dynasty, which had initiated the reforms, and then swept away the imperial system altogether.

The historical interpretation of these last decades of the Qing dynasty has undergone substantial revision in recent years. Traditionally, the Chinese themselves have always had a great respect for the study of history and tend to regard the past as a source of object lessons for the present and the future. However, in the twentieth century, Chinese historical scholarship became heavily influenced by the views of the Communists, after they won the civil war in 1949 and formed the People's Republic of China; thereafter all past events were viewed through the prism of Communist belief, particularly as articulated by Mao Zedong. Grounded in Marxist thinking, Chinese writers rejected the feudal repression of the imperial period with its reliance on Confucian scholarship and the court's focus on high culture and elitism. However, they were to be equally damning of the period that followed the downfall of the empire in 1911, that of the newly formed Republic of China; truly admirable history only began with Mao's assumption of power in 1949. The only early history worth studying and emulating was that of the growth of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the actions of the peasant rebels against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists, and the transformation of China into a Communist state.