Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
produce the entire crisis in the first place, had to go—now only outright
revolution, no longer simple reform, could save China. The Boxer
Rebellion also damaged the image and reputation of China in foreign
countries, and in the West talk of the “yellow peril,” or the implacable
hostility of the “yellow race” for the “white race,” became widespread.
It should be remembered, however, that the Boxer Rebellion was
largely a northern Chinese disturbance; many provinces in the south
more or less concluded separate peaces with the foreigners and were
not attacked by allied forces. The Qing central government had been
severely weakened in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion, and at no
time was this more apparent than during the Boxer Rebellion, when
it was clear that Peking's real authority extended only to the provinces
in the north. The rest of China was more or less free to deal with for-
eign governments in whichever ways they saw fit, and many prov-
inces did just that.
SUN YAT-SEN AND THE REVOLUTION OF 1911
The moribund Qing dynasty limped along for a few more years and
launched a few halfhearted reforms, but its days were numbered. The
empress dowager died in 1908, just after having her nephew, the
Guangxu emperor (r. 1875-1908), murdered. A child emperor was
installed, and one last imperial regency was established, but the
Chinese had had enough. On October 10, 1911, a mutiny that broke
out in the central Chinese city of Wuchang quickly spread. In early
1912, the last Manchu emperor of China abdicated peacefully and
amicably, without a cataclysmic final showdown between dynastic
and revolutionary forces. China's last dynasty passed into history not
with a bang, but a whimper.
Many Chinese worked long and hard to promote and achieve this
revolution, but the most well-known of them all is undoubtedly Sun
Yat-sen, a Chinese patriot andmedical doctor born in Guangdong prov-
ince in 1866. In his youth, Sun was quite impressed with the order and
cleanliness of the British and other foreign settlements in Canton. Early
in his life he began envying the wealth, power, and good order of the
West, and he nursed a nationalistic sense of regret that China was not
the equal of the West. He followed his brother to Hawaii in 1879 and,
once again favorably impressed with the West, enrolled in a Christian
school. In the 1880s he went to Hong Kong and Canton and earned a
medical degree, and in the early 1890s he began his medical practice.
His heart, however, was not in medicine but in treating the disease of
his native land. In 1894 he traveled to Peking and sought an interview
