The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China

Xiaowei Zheng

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781503601086, 9780804796675
• eBook ISBN: 9781503601093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

China's 1911 Revolution was a momentous political transformation. Its leaders, however, were not rebellious troublemakers on the periphery of imperial order. On the contrary, they were a powerful political and economic elite deeply entrenched in local society and well-respected both for their imperially sanctioned cultural credentials and for their mastery of new ideas. The revolution they spearheaded produced a new, democratic political culture that enshrined national sovereignty, constitutionalism, and the rights of the people as indisputable principles.

Based upon previously untapped Qing and Republican sources, The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China is a nuanced and colorful chronicle of the revolution as it occurred in local and regional areas. Xiaowei Zheng explores the ideas that motivated the revolution, the popularization of those ideas, and their animating impact on the Chinese people at large. The focus of the book is not on the success or failure of the revolution, but rather on the transformative effect that revolution has on people and what they learn from it.

1

Sichuan and the Old Regime

In historian S. A. M. Adshead’s view, until the twentieth century Sichuan was “the best province of a traditional empire.”¹ A territory the size of France, Sichuan was rich in resources, boasting superb premodern agriculture, an excellent intraprovincial communications network, a high level of urbanization, and abundant energy sources. Long a part of China proper, Sichuan had been depopulated during the late Ming rebellions but was quickly resettled by a vigorous group of people. By the end of the Qing, Sichuan had a population of forty-five million.²

Despite its prosperity, however, the province was isolated from the rest of the empire, and from a modern development perspective, Sichuan was considered backward. A Sichuanese student overseas wrote in 1901: “The land, climate, history, society, literature, and arts of Sichuan clearly differ from those in the Yellow River basin, the Pearl River region, and the lower Yangzi delta. It is a place of its own . . . almost an independent country.”³ At the turn of the twentieth century, few people would have imagined Sichuan becoming a pioneer of radical political movements; however, just a decade later, it was in Sichuan—rather than in the more economically advanced and politically central parts of the country—that the first, most dramatic, and most far-reaching provincewide revolution involving the modern politics of rights, citizenship, and nationalism broke out.

The task of this chapter is to introduce Sichuan as the place it was before the New Policies reform (1901–1911), in order to set the stage for the revolution that followed. In addition to discussing Sichuan’s unique geographical and socioeconomic structures and its imbalance in internal and external communications, the chapter also pays close attention to the functioning of the Chinese imperial system—the old regime—in Sichuan, which shared much with the rest of the empire. Like other parts of the empire, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century Sichuan struggled to survive the pressures and changes brought about by domestic rebellion and foreign intervention. An imperial mobilization in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) fully integrated Sichuan into the Qing empire. However, the defensive posture of the old regime in the face of rebellions in the mid-nineteenth century destabilized the old power balance among the imperial center, the provincial leaders, the local elite, and the common people. Not long after, the so-called missionary cases (jiao’an), that is, confrontations between Christians and non-Christians ranging from harassment to deadly riots, added another dimension to the tension. Increasingly unequal to its tasks, the traditional polity found its legitimacy severely questioned, in both Sichuan and elsewhere.

Sichuan: A “Heavenly Land” in Isolation

Before the twentieth century, Sichuan drew nothing but unanimous praise (see Map 1.1). The official geography described it as “a land rich and fair, with an abundance of rivers and streams, fertile lands, forests and bamboo groves, vegetables and fruit.”⁴ Early in his tenure, Xiliang, the Sichuan governor-general from 1903 to 1907, noted that “its products are abundantly rich” and that “the land is spacious and the people numerous.”⁵ Europeans were equally enthusiastic. German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen observed that Sichuan had “a degree of ease and well-being as regards the sustenance of life, not common in other provinces of China.”⁶ And the British Blackburn mission of 1896–1897 reported, “Rich in everything which goes to support trade, agriculture, mineral wealth, products of skilled labor and the comparative wealth of its people, this province is par excellence the market, of all others, it should be our endeavor to gain.”⁷

MAP 1.1. Sichuan in the Qing empire.

Located at the southwestern corner of the Qing empire, Sichuan was poorly linked to the rest of the empire. It is surrounded by mountains and plateaus, all at least 3,300 feet high. A Chinese proverb says, “It is more difficult to ascend to Sichuan than to ascend to heaven.” In the same vein, Richthofen marveled that “this population is connected with the rest of the civilized world by one inconvenient mountain-road . . . and one large river.”⁸ In the face of this geographical isolation, Sichuan managed to maintain its rugged self-sufficiency.

Traditional agriculture flourished in Sichuan. The province not only produced more grain than any other province in China but also ranked among the highest in terms of both output per capita and yield per cultivated acre.⁹ Protected by the northern rampart of the Daba Mountains from the dry, cold winds of Central Asia, yet open to the warm, wet winds from the South China Sea, Sichuan enjoyed an exceptional climate that was generally humid in both summer and winter, thus supporting many varieties of grain and allowing for double-cropping. In addition, thanks to a fiftyfold population increase over the course of the Qing, a ready supply of labor was available for terracing hillsides: “Where the angle of a slope is 30 degrees, the whole hillside is usually covered with fields from the bottom to the top.”¹⁰ As a result, Sichuan had a greater percentage of cultivated land than other southern provinces. Blessed with a favorable climate and an industrious population making optimal use of its land, Sichuan was among the most productive agricultural areas in the empire.

Observers also noted that wealth from Sichuan’s agriculture was more equitably distributed than in other parts of the empire. Richthofen wrote: “The inhabitants are evidently in a state of general prosperity. In the cities and in the country there is a certain luxury in dress and habitations in Sz’-chwan as compared with other provinces.” Wealth appeared to be “more evenly distributed and therefore, more conspicuous.”¹¹ The reason for this was migration. Sichuan was colonized not by clans as in south China, but by nuclear families and individuals, providing an infrastructure of independent family enterprise that underlay the achievements of Sichuanese agriculture.¹²

Sichuan also enjoyed better intraprovincial communications, both by water and by land, than most other regions of China. Although Sichuan was admittedly disadvantaged in its communication with other provinces of the empire, its excellent internal communications made its external isolation trivial at a time when interregional exchanges amounted to only a low percentage of the gross national product. The province had a superb network of navigable water routes. According to historian Wang Di, there were 540 rivers in the province, more than ninety of them navigable.¹³ Sichuan’s major axis was the Yangzi River, to which all of Sichuan’s secondary rivers were linked, forming a complete network of navigable water routes. Twenty-nine navigable river lines linked directly to the Yangzi, constituting 2,234 navigable kilometers (see Map 1.2). Six secondary river axes ran through the province: the Min, Tuo, Jialing, Fu, Qu, and Qian rivers (see Map 1.3). In view of all this, transportation by water in Sichuan, though inferior to the superb water route system of the lower Yangzi delta, was impressive. There were about two million Sichuan men working as boat trackers during the Xuantong reign (1909–1911). These boats, traveling up and down the rivers of Sichuan, connected residents and goods within this vast province.¹⁴

MAP 1.2. The Yangzi River in Sichuan.

MAP 1.3. The six secondary rivers of Sichuan.

Land transportation in Sichuan was another matter. High mountains and rugged terrain in the upper Yangzi River region made travel by land difficult. Even so, Sichuan had a comprehensive overland transportation structure made up of two kinds of roads: provincial highroads and local footpaths.¹⁵ The provincial highroads, built and maintained with state revenue, were twenty-one feet wide and “well paved with flagstones, wide enough for the pack-trains to pass each other, and kept in excellent repair.”¹⁶ They were used principally for military and political purposes. The fastest service, 345 kilometers per day, was reserved for urgent matters such as the announcement of the death of a governor-general or the loss of a key battle. The 230-kilometer-per-day service was for transmitting notices of impeachment of officials or reports on sentences of death every fall. The 115-kilometer-per-day service was for transferring regular memorials and reports by provincial officials; at the beginning of every month, provincial documents were collected and dispatched to Beijing. Because Chengdu was 2,735 kilometers away, it took eight, twelve, and twenty-four days, respectively, for Sichuan documents to reach the capital.¹⁷ Along the routes that connected post stations, four major highroads were constructed, all converging on the political hub, Chengdu (see Map 1.4).

MAP 1.4. The four main routes in Sichuan (1644–1911).

In addition to the official highroads, there were roads paved by each county, town, and village. County roads were about ten feet wide; county footpaths varied from six feet to less than 1.6 feet in width, and most were paved with flagstones. According to Richthofen, Sichuan had “an infinite number of footpaths [that] permeate the country; and there is probably no hilly region in China so well provided with them.”¹⁸ The highroads and the footpaths connected Sichuanese from all over the province. To a large degree, Sichuan’s affluence was attributable to its intraprovincial communications and transport system, which made commerce a thriving and essential part of Sichuanese daily life.

With both water and overland networks of communication, Sichuan possessed an impressive urban structure. The British consul-general in Chengdu, Alexander Hosie, estimated in 1904 that 30 percent of the province’s population was urban.¹⁹ Contemporary economist Dwight Perkins confirms the view that Sichuan had a high level of urbanization. Perkins’s map of Chinese cities shows that in 1900, seven of the forty-six cities with a population of ten thousand or more were in Sichuan, a number not exceeded by any other province. In addition to the three main centers, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Ziliujing, there were numerous smaller cities, usually at intersections of the communications grid. The wealth of Sichuan’s cities, large and small, depended on the wealth of the province’s villages.²⁰

A comprehensive explanation for the prosperity that made such an impression on outsiders must include the relative richness of energy resources. Sichuan had an abundance of human muscle, animals, water, and wood. There was no shortage of labor in the province, particularly as the population rose from twenty million in 1800 to more than forty million in 1900.²¹ As for livestock, Adshead, for example, estimates that there were ten thousand water buffalo in Ziliujing alone.²² Canals on the Chengdu Plain boasted tens of thousands of water wheels used to grind rice and power spinning wheels and looms.²³ The province also demonstrated considerable ingenuity in the use of coal and natural gas. For example, natural gas has been used since the third century to boil brine for salt, and according to archaeologist Lothar von Falkenhausen, the region’s subterraneous salt deposits have been, and remain today, an important element in the long-lasting economic prosperity of the Sichuan region.²⁴

All of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Political Transformation of 1911
• 1. Sichuan and the Old Regime
• 2. The Ideas of Revolution: Equality, the People’s Rights, and Popular Sovereignty
• 3. The Project: The Chuan-Han Railway Company and the New Policies Reform
• 4. Can Two Sides Walk Together Without Agreeing to Meet? Constitutionalists and Officials in the Late Qing Constitutional Reform
• 5. The Rhetoric of Revolution: The Rights of the Nation, Constitutionalism, and the Rights of the People
• 6. The Practice of Revolution: Organization, Mobilization, and Radicalization
• 7. The Expansion and Division of Revolution: Democratic Political Culture in Action
• 8. The End of Revolution: The Rise of Republicanism and the Failure of Constitutionalism
• Conclusion: The Legacy of the 1911 Revolution
• Appendix: The Pu Family of Guang’an County
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index