Page 292 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

revolution—china 1593

Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are
needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to
create progress. • Chester Himes (1909–1984)

Braudel, F. (1982). The wheels of commerce. New York: Harper & Row. Chinese radicals already understood it in the sense of the
Braudel, F. (1984). The perspective of the world. London: HarperCollins American or French revolutions—establishment of a new
Publishers.
Brown, A. (1999). The Renaissance (2nd ed.). London: Longman. political order. Closely associated with ideas of progress
Hale, J. R. (1994). The civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. New and popular sovereignty, it was manifestly new and for-
York: Atheneum.
Hartt, F. (1994). A history of Italian Renaissance art (4th ed.). New York: eign, in fact, a response to the military and political
H.N. Abrams. humiliations China had suffered at the hands of indus-
Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly goods. New York: Nan A.Talese. trialized Western powers since the middle of the nine-
Jensen, D. (1992). Renaissance Europe (2nd ed.). Lexington, MA: D.C.
Heath. teenth century.
Kelley, D. R. (1991). Renaissance humanism. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
King, M. (1991). Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of The Republican
Chicago Press.
Nauert, C. G. (1995). Humanism and the culture of Renaissance Europe. Revolution, 1911
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. The first revolution came rather unexpectedly, although
Scammell, G.V. (1989). The first imperial age: European overseas expan-
sion, 1400–1715. London: Unwin Hyman. for more than a decade there had been revolutionary agi-
Tracy, J. D. (1990). The rise of merchant empires: Long distance trade in tation and small-scale uprisings, especially in the south.
the early modern world, 1350–1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press. Most of these were led by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) and
Welch, E. S. (1997). Art and society in Italy, 1350–1500. Oxford: drew support from overseas Chinese business commu-
Oxford University Press.
nities and the new generation of young intellectuals
studying what was known as Western learning. Sun’s call
to overthrow the “alien” Qing dynasty (1644–1912; the
imperial family during the Qing dynasty was ethnically
Revolution—China Manchu, not Han Chinese) strongly appealed to the eth-

nic nationalism they had learned largely from the West.
evolution is a twentieth-century phenomenon in When the revolution broke out, almost accidentally
RChina, although the three-thousand-year-old empire from a botched military coup in the city of Wuhan in east-
had a long history of peasant rebellions and dynastic ern central China on the Chang (Yangzi) River, lack of
overthrow. For much of the second half of the twentieth effective leadership in Beijing (the emperor was only a
century, the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 child) combined with widespread frustration over the
was seen as the decisive revolution, or perhaps the com- Qing court’s inability to strengthen and modernize
pletion of earlier incomplete or “failed” revolutions.With China, and imperial authority rapidly collapsed through-
the cooling-off of the Communist revolution in recent out southern and central China. Sun Yat-sen became
decades, that metanarrative is open to question and the president of a short-lived provisional government, but the
earlier revolutions of 1911 and 1927 acquire more revolution was soon hijacked by China’s most powerful
prominence in the long process of transforming an military man,Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), a different kind
ancient agrarian-bureaucratic empire into a modern of modernizer.Yuan used his military muscle to squeeze
nation-state and industrialized society. out Sun Yat-sen and his party’s elected representatives in
Even the word revolution was new in China in the late the new National Assembly.
nineteenth century.Along with many Western ideas about The revolution thus ended in apparent failure, with no
modernity, it came to China from Japan as a neologism democracy, no progressive political program, and China
formed by taking the ancient Confucian term for a heav- torn apart by civil wars after Yuan Shikai’s demise. Nev-
enly mandate to rule and putting the word remove before ertheless, the rather premature revolution of 1911 had
it.Thus, geming literally means “to remove the mandate” ended 2,100 years of imperial bureaucratic government,
(political legitimacy), but by the early twentieth century replacing the hereditary emperor with a (supposedly)