Livebloging 1911

Someone once said “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

That is a pretty radical statement. Also a somewhat analytical one. Very few have ever accused Sun Yat-sen, father of the 1911 Revolution of being either a radical or overly analytical. He was however, great at dinner parties. On March 19th he was not in Canton, where the April uprising would be happening, nor in Hong Kong, where it was mostly being planned. He was in Vancouver, ¹ talking to audiences of Overseas Chinese. He raised $7,000 HK, which was the largest total raised for the April uprising anywhere in the world. If Huang Xing was the organizer of the revolution Sun was the publicist and fund-raiser. Having been abducted in London in 1896 and briefly imprisoned in the Chinese legation made him by far the best-known Chinese revolutionary overseas, and his tireless fund-raising and organizing in Southeast Asia, North America, Japan and elsewhere made him the best known spokesman for the overthrow of the Qing and establishment of a Republic. So although he played a pretty limited role in the actual 1911 revolution it is worth thinking about him for a bit. They also serve who only wrangle invitations to banquets and give speeches.

Although the bulk of his uprisings were failures, a revolution costs a lot of money, and while giving speeches all over the world on the Overseas Chinese rubber chicken circuit must have been a drag he kept at it, and had a rare ability to convince everyone from wealthy Cantonese merchants to railroad laborers to part with their cash.  Sun’s personal ability to persuade people to support the cause was a major asset, even if it was not clear what all these resources, both money and recruits, were best used for. So today is a fine day to remember Sun Yat-sen, who among his many other achievements, was the after-dinner speaker who financed the 1911 Revolution.

1. Or somewhere in Canada. The nianpu I have is not very detailed, but in was in Vancouver about the 19th.

Live-blogging 1911

Live-blogging is (for historians) the process of blogging about something in the past as if it was happening in the present. Since this is the 100^th anniversary of the 1911 revolution, I thought it might be nice do something on that. The Wuhan revolt is still a ways off, but the Canton uprising is (although nobody knew it) right around the corner. Textbooks tend to dismiss the various revolts that Sun Yat-sen encouraged in the years before 1911 as pathetic failures, which is true enough, but by early 1911 some of them were becoming more substantial. There were a couple of disturbances in the New Army in Canton early in 1911, the first of which happened on February 12, exactly one year before the Manchu emperor formally abdicated.

Revolutionaries vaguely connected to Sun Yat-sen had been organizing in the New Army in Canton for some time. . Ni Yingdian 倪映典 was the ringleader of the revolt. He was the son of a traditional Chinese doctor from Anhui and had risen to command an New Army artillery division before being dismissed for revolutionary activity. He promptly moved to Guangdong and joined the new army there and was again dismissed for revolutionary activity, although he was not arrested. It may seem a bit odd that he was dismissed but not arrested twice, but the Qing government was less in control of things than they might have hoped and also desperate for modern-trained men. More to the point, during the New Policies period many revolutionaries were turning into reformers, and they may have hoped that the same would happen with Ni.

Unfortunately a mutiny occurred among the troops of the Second Regiment on February 10^{th ,}, well before the planned date for the revolt. Sun Yat-sen had raised over HK 8,000 to support the revolt, and preparations were being made for supporting revolts in the countryside, but Ni decided he could not wait and encouraged his old comrades to rise up. When the commander of the Artillery Division refused to join the revolt Ni shot him, which pretty much committed them to the revolt, which was put down the next day. Ni Yingdian was one of the first rebels killed. Several others were executed later and the rebellious units disbanded.

Although the revolt itself had minimal support it was a revolt of active military units in a major city, which was an upgrade from some previous revolutionary actions. The punishment of the rebels actually won them a good deal of support.  Sun and his followers began mobilizing for a new revolt in Canton.  “Intellectuals, tradesmen, workers and peasants” began to assemble in the city. Female members of the Revolutionary Alliance posed as brides and began smuggling arms into the city.  They also took over a newspaper which had been created to oppose a planned provincial gambling monopoly and used it to spread revolutionary ideas. So that is pretty much where things stood in March of 1911

Most of the above is from Rhodes, China’s Republican Revolution

P.S. If anyone has suggestions for posts, feel free to sent them to me.



Over at the invaluable Danwei,  Julian Smisek’s “Hu Shi, missionaries, and women’s rights” (July 15, 2010) does a valuable service in translating Hu’s 1930 essay, “Congratulations to the YWCA,”  which pays tribute to Christian missionaries for helping Chinese women.

Hu, a Columbia University PhD, won a poll in the early 1920s as the most admired “returned student” in China. But his surprising words of praise for the YWCA need to be balanced against his views on Christianity’s future in China. He elsewhere disdained the run of Christian missionaries as uneducated and narrow. They came to China because they could live well for little money, he said, and mission boards were far less careful in selecting China missionaries than Standard Oil was in selecting China salesmen and executives.

Hu’s “China and Christianity” was the lead piece in the July 1927 issue of the North American journal, The Forum. That year saw Chiang Kai-shek purge the Communists and Mao Zedong take to the countryside, setting off a generation of civil war, but the editor introduces Hu as “the leader of an intellectual movement that is permeating the youth of China and is interested chiefly in the things of the mind.” Like the “ancient sages of the East,” Hu “stands outside the current political conflict.”

Here’s the editorial in its entirety:

The future of Christianity in China is a question which should be considered apart from the question of the past services rendered to China by the Christian missionaries. The part played by the missionaries in the modernization of China will long be remembered by the Chinese, even though no Christian church may be left there. They were the pioneers of the new China. They helped the Chinese to fight for the suppression of opium which the pirate-traders brought to us. They agitated against footbinding, which eight centuries of esoteric philosophizing in native China failed to recognize as an inhuman institution. And they brought to us the first rudiments of European science. The early Jesuits gave us the pre-Newtonian astronomy, and the later Protestant missionaries introduced modern hospitals and schools. They taught us to know that there was a new world and a new civilization behind the pirate-traders and gunboats.

Many of the Protestant missionaries worked hard to awaken China and bring about a modern nation. China is now awakened and determined to modernize herself. There is not the slightest doubt that a new and modem China is emerging out of chaos. But this new China does not seem to promise much bright future to the propagation of the Christian faith. On the contrary, Christianity is facing opposition everywhere. The dream of a “Christian occupation of China” seems to be fast vanishing, – probably forever. And the explanation is not far to seek.

It is true that there is much cheap argument in the narrow nationalistic attack which sees in the Christian missionary an agent of imperialist aggression. But we must realize that it is nationalism, – the self-consciousness of a nation with no mean cultural past,– that once killed Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheism in China. It is the same nationalism which four times persecuted Buddhism and finally killed it after over a thousand years of complete Buddhistic conquest of China. And it is the same national consciousness which is now resisting the essentially alien religion of Christianity.

And more formidable than nationalism, there is the rise of rationalism. We must not forget that Chinese philosophy began two thousand five hundred years ago with Lao Tse who taught a naturalistic conception of the universe end a Confucius who was frankly an agnostic. This rationalistic and humanistic tradition has always played the part of a liberator in every age when the nation seemed to be under the influence of a superstitious or fanatic religion. This cultural background of indigenous China is now revived with the new reinforcement of the methods and conclusions of modern science and becomes a truly formidable safeguard of the intellectual class against the imposition of any religious system whose fundamental dogmas, despite all efforts of its apologists, do not always stand the test of reason and science.

And after all, Christianity itself is fighting its last battle, even in the so-called Christendoms. To us born heathens, it is a strange sight indeed to see Billy Sunday and Aimée McPherson hailed and patronized in an age whose acknowledge prophets are Darwin and Pasteur. The religion of Elmer Gantry and Sharon Falconer must sooner or later make all thinking people feel ashamed to call themselves “Christians”. And then they will realize that Young China was not far wrong in offering some opposition to a religion which in its glorious days fought religious wars and persecuted science, and which, in the broad daylight of the twentieth century prayed for the victory of the belligerent nations in the World War and is still persecuting the teaching of science in certain quarters of Christendom.

It’s impressive both that The Forum published a critical piece from an intellectual in China and that Hu kept up with the latest stateside scandals and the novels of Sinclair Lewis. At a time when anti-imperialist tempers ran high, Hu coolly uses cosmopolitan liberal standards which stand above particular nations. His criteria apply to China and the US as well. But perhaps Hu should have known better than to think that rationality could combine with nationalism to save China.

Recently I went to the Jianchuan museums, which are in Anren, just outside Chengdu. It is an interesting place first because it is huge, financed by mogul Fan Jianchuan, and second because it is a private museum, something not very common in China.

The place is covers a lot of ground, and there are, or soon will be buildings showcasing West Sichuan folk customs, footbinding, traditional houses, and the response to the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. They are already working on the building for the last of these, and some of the artifacts are sitting outside.

The biggest and most interesting sections are on the War with Japan and the Red Years.

The War buildings (there are several) are strongly nationalistic (it is glorious to die for the homeland, etc) and pretty popular with the Chinese visitors. The war also gets some of the most striking installations, including a display of the handprints of 300 veterans and statues of 200 heroes of the war (mostly generals and commanders of various sorts.)

Both of them sort of reminded me of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, in that they rely on the effect of masses of individuals (each of the handprints and statues has an inscription telling you who it is.) The statues also remind me somewhat of Qin Shihuang’s terracotta warriors, although having been given names and not being in such strict ranks they are more individualized.¹

The interpretation of the war focuses primarily on heroism and sacrifice. There is not much interpretation of how the war progressed or what happened in it, just endless scenes of sacrifice and combat. There is a whole building on the Nationalist armies, which is unusual, and they are credited with having killed a million Japanese while suffering over three million casualties. American aid and the Flying Tigers also get a building, and their contributions are listed.

The museums in general are not overflowing with artifacts, although they do have a few.

Mostly they rely on pictures, like this one of an ambulance team of monks

Or this injured boyscout.

There are a lot of pictures blown up on the walls with a 3-D element, like this

There are also a number of somewhat interactive exhibits, like a tunnel for tunnel warfare, and the Flying Tiger bar where you can have a beer and feel just like an American. (I passed.)

The Red Years section has some installations

but mostly it focuses on what life was like in the Mao years, emphasizing both the idealism and the over-politicization of the period. So we get things like a bedstead that greets you with Mao quotes when you wake up,

and a piano which defends itself from charges of being bourgeois by proclaiming that art must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers.

The exhibits are about as critical of the Mao years as I have ever seen in China, although not of Mao personally. The porcelain exhibit explicitly criticizes the politicization of teacups, emphasizes the continuing class nature (and poverty) of Maoist society by explaining which classes of people could afford what, and compares having an image of Mao in your house was like having a Bodhisattva around in the old society.

As close as you get to really explicit criticism is the hallway where you exit the Daily Life building, were you walk over a list of the years of the Cultural Revolution as slogans are shouted overhead.

The museums take on the Mao years is a little on the schizophrenic side. The texts keep emphasizing the contradiction between idealism and chaos, and there is a picture of Fan Jinchuan himself in Inner Mongolia striking his best Lei Feng pose. What might strike the young people coming to look at it most is the poverty of the old society.

I suspect the place is going to become more political, as they are currently working on buildings on the Great Leap and China’s Famine. I can’t imagine how you could deal with those without some fairly explicit criticism. The place is well worth seeing. Most Chinese historic sites focus on a fairly abstract traditional period or the straight revolutionary narrative. This is one that goes a good deal further.

1. Also, like Qin Shihuang himself, they are on top of a relief map of China.

NYT reports (via CDT) that China is offering to help California build a high-speed rail network. The Times’ take is that the worm has certainly turned if China is giving California high technology (and capital.) More interesting to me is the historical background of the current Chinese high-speed rail system. The Times gives us this map.

I would guess that some of these lines are being built for political reasons, to tie the country together. I assume there should be plenty of people in a hurry to get from Beijing to Tianjin, but maybe not so many in a hurry to get to Golmud. There is actually a long history of countries in general and China in particular using railways to bind the nation together. Sun Yat-sen had plans for railway expansion that might charitably be called highly ambitious, and were certainly more driven by the goal of protecting national territory than by economics. Mary Burdman explicitly connects China’s current rail expansion plans to Sun’s vision and included maps of other aspects of China’s planned rail system, like the planned regional intercity systems to be built around Shanghai and Beijing. Maybe soon it will be as easy to get from Nanjing to Shanghai as it is to get from Amsterdam to The Hague. Burdman (who is a LaRouchite) also belives that this is the first step in a grand global alliance between China, Russian, India and the U.S. to defeat the British, thus proving that even crazy people can make good historical analogies and provide good maps.

Just for fun, here is my video of the maglev from the airport to Shanghai. It’s the fastest train the the world! And it’s in China!

Here, from Stapleton’s Civilizing Chengdu is Yang Wei, Chinese Revolutionary, in prison, November 25, 1911. Below is a picture of Yang as superintendent of police in March 1912. I use both of these in class when talking about 1911, but I am posting the top one here because it is such a striking picture. It’s obviously posed, as most pictures had to be back then, and Yang clearly has a sense of himself as the dramatic revolutionary that is lacking from every other picture of the 1911 crowd I can think of.  Is anyone aware of anything else like this from the period? Any guesses as to what the others in the shot are there for?

As we are at mid-semester I thought it would be a nice time to think about Education, with a little help from Feng Zikai, Republican China’s best-known cartoonist.

Feng obviously did not think much of education in general

Education is the process of changing raw materials into something else

But it does not seem to be much fun for those who experience it.

To some extent schools are just part of a larger social process. Here the fists are labeled Parents and Teachers

Society creates social difference. Here are two sons looking at their fathers

But schools are a big part of it, as Elementary, Middle and College (in the center) teachers

Change their students into copies of themselves

Schools as intstituions were part of the problem. The monkey on top of the pole is the teacher, the administrators are playing a tune, students are watching, and of course someone is collecting money. I may have to put this on my office door.

Teachers might try to destroy student's minds with endless drill and repetition

But the human spirit will always find ways to resist

Even in the days before Facebook and texting, students could find better things to do in class that whatever they were supposed to. Here we see a student in English class reading something in Chinese, (hopefully a Wuxia novel)

a student in an economics lecture doing something of practical economic use.

Of course no matter how they fought back, the institution was still trying to reduce them to a common level, and there was not much they could do about it. Here we see the Chinese version of No Child Left Behind, leveling them all off by age.

This may make Feng look cynical. He was actually one of the most sentimental artists I know, but something about schools brought out the acid in his pen.

All images from the Chinese edition of Christoph Harbsmeier Feng Zikai Social Realism with a Buddhist Face Shandong Huabao, 2004

The people in the reading room at Shaanxi Provincial Archives are really nice and helpful and professional. Unlike some archives they will let you look at things that are not directly connected to your approved research topic. They will also let you drink tea right there in the reading room while reading documents. On the downside they have taken over half of the reading room to practice their song and dance routine for China’s upcoming 60^th national day. Fortunately I, like everyone else, am so excited about the celebration that it does not bother me.  I found a few documents on an American soldier who was busted for stealing cultural relics in 1945. Violation of cultural relics laws was a big problem in Shaanxi, and they have a fair number of documents on it going back to the 1930s. They don’t give his name, but apparently he was caught with an entire truckload of stuff, including 9 “Xia dynasty” bronze ding and 3 Six Dynasties Buddha images. Total value over 5 million yuan. By 1945 Americans no longer enjoyed extraterritoriality, so he was subject to Chinese law. On the other hand, members of the American military were governed by a status of forces agreement that gave them many of the same privileges. He did not cooperate or say much to his captors. I suspect if he had been caught with couple TLV mirrors in his backpack they would have just ignored it or maybe confiscated them. A truck puts him in Kelly’s Heroes territory, however, and they had to do something. Of course this guy could have regularized his actions without too much trouble. Lots of American China collections, most notably the Harvard library were built up during or right after the war by having Americans with money and official connections go around buying up everything they could get their hands on. One assumes this soldier was not digging this stuff up himself, he had Chinese accomplices (not mentioned here) who were helping him because he had lots of greenbacks. Of course that is totally different than say, Fairbank, tossing around Harvard money, since he was buying up Chinese culture in a poor and disordered country -with- official permission, and with a scholarly purpose, rather than for personal aggrandizement, and this guy was doing the opposite. Plus the soldier did not have a Ph.D. As so often happens in archives the documents end before the case is resolved. The last document is from the provincial government, asking if maybe the artifacts are fakes, perhaps as a way to sweep the incident under the rug. Too bad, since a trial might have generated more statements about what actually went down.