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1911: the Xinhai Year of Revolution 辛亥革命The Xinhai 辛亥 year of 1911-1912 marked the failure of an ambitious, although tardy, program of political reform launched by the Qing court, China's last imperial ruling house. It was a year when an ill-conceived bid by Beijing to take control of locally developed railways and strategically flawed military repression added to widespread elite and popular discontent. Inchoate regional disturbances led to open revolt and eventually revolution. By the end of Xinhai the young emperor Xuantong 宣統 (also known in English as Henry Puyi) had been forced to abdicate and a Republic of China had been declared.  A hundred years on the Xinhai remains a controversial period. The year 2011 started with Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 in Taiwan lauding the Xinhai centenary for providing an occasion to celebrate democracy, modernity and social progress. On the other side of the Taiwan Strait reflections are not quite as sanguine. The previous official monopoly over the interpretation of history has long since been undermined. At least for the engaged public, the intelligentsia and the web-savvy, online forums provide unprecedented outlets for semi-public debate over the state of the country and its future. In these, as well as in the confines of more covert deliberation, the promise of the past continues to haunt the present. Despite the realities of unflagging one-party rule, groups with widely different political agendas gather, talk and plan for an uncertain future. The agendas of the brutalists, party reformers, neo-liberals, abstract social democrats, Maoists, born-again Warring States fascists (or those with views reminiscent of the war-era Zhangguoce pai 战国策派) and so on have little in common, yet they share a profound unease over the fact that the very reforms that have transformed life for countless people have also given license to egregious official behaviour. While there are those who want to see an ever stronger state willing to forswear the lure of global capital, those of a more liberal bent argue that substantive political and legal reforms are, today as in the past, urgently required to limit the party's control over social life. For them only such changes could hope to ameliorate rising social tensions, iniquities and abuses of power in the long run. Even the top echelons of the party-state cannot ignore these discussions; all are aware that when it comes to the country's political future, the past is not a foreign country. They know that when people speak of the political stagnation, corruption and mismanagement rife in China today they are hearing eerie echoes of another era—that of the late Qing (wan Qing 晚清). In the dying years of the Qing empire issues of national sovereignty and territorial integrity played a significant role in the vociferous rise of a new nationalism, and the agitation among elites and the populace at large for increased national assertiveness. In the Features section of this issue we introduce the work of younger scholars in a section called 'From the Edge'. Compiled by David Brophy and his colleagues this material focuses on the borderlands of the Qing empire during the years of tumult surrounding 1911, just as in New Scholarship Robbie Barnett offers a reflection on Owen Lattimore and the abiding importance of understanding China's still, and crucially, restive 'peripheries'. Also in Features we offer an overview of Xinhai-related Chinese-language publications from the site 1510 (Yiwu Yishi Buluo 一五一十部落, at: http://my1510.cn/). This compilation reflects the wealth of new material on the Xinhai period that has appeared during this year. Various monographs, edited volumes and book series revisit historical personalities, the origins of the revolution and its complex and contradictory repercussions. An overview of discussions of Xinhai in the Chinese popular media is provided in selection of material from the CIW-Danwei Online Archive. In this section we also present a sample of views on Xinhai in Chinese from the noted historians Lei Yi 雷颐, Yang Guoqiang 杨国强 and Qin Hui 秦晖, gleaned from the leading Xinhai-related websites Xinhai Geming wang and Xinhai Geming.  Fig.2 Poster for 'The Xinhai Revolution', a film directed by Zhang Li 张黎 and released in China on 23 September 2011, Hangzhou. (Photograph: GRB) Jane Leung Larson traces the history of the Chinese Empire Reform Association (Baohuang Hui 保皇會) through documents. We reprint a study of the rise and fall of the queue in Qing and early republican history by Michael Godley, while Charles Horner and Eric Brown consider the Xinhai and its immediate relevance to understanding China today. Sang Ye 桑曄 offers five sketches from the Xinhai period that reflect some of the more comic aspects of what was a precipitous revolution. In Articles we publish an oral history interview by Sang Ye with a teacher in Guangxi province that offers a family history from the late Qing period to the present. We also present the Seventy-second Morrison Lecture at ANU. Given by Linda Jaivin in July 2011, the lecture depicts the world of George E. Morrison, after whom the series was named. Morrison was, among other things, an adviser to Yuan Shikai, president of the new republic, and in 1915 he persuaded Yuan to leak news of Japan's notorious 'Twenty-one Demands', something that would help fuel the mass protests and student radicalism of the May Fourth era. As Linda points out, he was not the only Australian to play a role in the Xinhai era. Another Australian journalist, W.H. Donald, helped Sun Yat-sen draft the English version of the manifesto of the nascent republic. Another dimension of the relationship between China and Australian in that period of upheaval was Liang Qichao's 1900 visit to the Antipodes, discussed in this section by Gloria Davies. Evans Chan's new film 'Datong: The Great Society 大同: 康有爲在瑞典' is also introduced in this section, and we update readers on an artist whose precipitous detention and sudden release reflect the shaky workings of China's authoritarians. T'ien Hsia carries the first of Pierre Ryckmans' 1996 'Boyer Lectures', reprinted with permission, while Scott Seligman recounts a fascinating episode from early twentieth-century New York history involving the Jewish and Chinese communities on Manhattan's Lower East Side. This section also reproduces the editor's inaugural CIW lecture entitled 'Australia and China in the World: Whose Literacy?'. In New Scholarship David Brophy's translations from the Russian Muslim press provide an account of the Xinhai uprising in the far western reaches of the Qing empire, while Peter Zarrow gives a digest of a panel devoted to 1911 at the Association of Asian Studies in early 2011. We finish with a report on an exhibition of China-related Jesuit books at Boston College by Jeremy Clarke SJ. As ever, I am grateful to Daniel Sanderson for his work on this issue of China Heritage Quarterly, and for the contributions of David Brophy and Tanya Fan, as well as for the support of Raymond Lum, Jane Leung Larson and Evans Chan.—Geremie R. Barmé, Editor |
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