Chapter VII
[THE REVOLUTION]
On October 9, 1911, a follower of Sun Yat-sen, one of the heroic and desperate "Dare-to-dies" who had harassed the imperial government for years, was working over a bomb in the Russian concession in the upriver port of Hankow. The bomb exploded accidentally; the secret storage of munitions was discovered; the next day, in the ensuing turmoil, the Republic of China was born. Double Ten Day (October 10, 1911) has since been celebrated as the Chinese Fourth of July. When the imperial officials sought to suppress the insurrection, they uncovered a conspiracy in the ranks of their own troops; in self-protection the troops revolted. In the next two months the Manchu Empire crumbled away. Sun Yat-sen, who was in Chicago at the time of the outbreak,[1] could trust his organization. Sure that destiny was working with him, he took his leisure in returning to China and stopped in London to forestall financial aid to the collapsing Empire.
[The Presidency of Sun Yat-sen and the Republican Revolution]
The fall of the Empire was not the result of a great mass movement agitating the whole population; it developed from the revolutionary nucleus which Sun and his followers had built up to secure power. They had hammered away at the imperial regime by instigating mutiny and terror for many years, since they realized that the incompetence of the government was matched only by its impotence. The revolution itself was a chain of rebellions, occurring province by province under the leadership of revolutionaries or officials joining the revolution. Except for the massacre of Manchus in some of the cities, it was a nearly bloodless revolution. However, the various groups pushed in different directions, and different men tried to seize power. The constitutional monarchists compelled the throne to issue a very liberal constitution, which might be accepted by the populace in place of the Republican programs. Military men began to come to the fore, as the army units alone were in a position of unchallengeable power. Men who had no thought of revolution might join it in time to become leaders of the revolutionary-military juntas. Li Yüan-hung, an officer of the Empire, hid under his bed when revolutionary soldiers sought him out; given the choice between death and adherence to the revolutionaries, he sided with the new powers, and in a short while became the commanding officer of the revolutionary forces in the Wu-han cities. Similar instances were not uncommon.
The revolutionaries managed to call together representatives of their party and of the troops to a National Convention at Nanking. They were seriously handicapped by the absence of Sun Yat-sen, who now hastened back to China from London. Few of the members of the revolutionary group—heretofore forced to operate as a secret society—were well enough known to have the prestige needed to form a new government. Huang Hsing, Sun's chief military follower, sought to manage in the interim, but not until the arrival of Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai on December 24, 1911, was there a prospect of consolidation. Five days later the National Convention elected him president of the Provisional Government of the United Provinces. On January 1, 1912, he took office; with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar now in use, this date became the first day of the Year I of the Chinese Republic. With the presidency there was created a cabinet, whose ministers did not yet hold any specific portfolios. The portions of the country under revolutionary control were ruled for the time being by a temporary system which combined the military and civilian governments in each province.
Meanwhile, the Empire was still the internationally recognized government of China and continued to function in Peking. Thoroughly frightened, the imperial court saw no alternative to calling into its service the one man who could be expected to master the situation—Yüan Shih-k'ai, who had ruthlessly terminated the experiment of the Hundred Days in 1898 and whipped up the first effective modern army of the Empire. Yüan, who had fallen into disfavor as a result of court machinations a few years before, waited his time, receiving offers from both sides. Finally he went to Peking, on October 27, 1911.
The negotiations which ensued over the establishment of a new government and the pacification of the country brought into the spotlight two of the outstanding personalities of modern China—men whose characters were to mold the institutions in a highly plastic society and whose influences were to last beyond their deaths. Sun Yat-sen, a Cantonese with many overseas connections, stood outside the old-style elite—a constitutionalist and an idealist. Yüan was a soldier and diplomat from the North, narrow in outlook, altogether a tradition-bound official despite his up-to-date military ideas—an opportunist and a realist in politics. Rarely have two leaders represented such opposite extremes.