Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
American and European support for the new republican regime.
Although Sun was an effective agitator for revolution, he did not com-
mand as much military power as he would need to sustain a new
republican regime once it was established. Someone else, however,
did. He was an unscrupulous and conniving general named Yuan
Shikai, who had long served the Manchus. After the success of the
October 1911 revolution, Sun did not insist on becoming the president
of the new Republic of China himself, but turned the presidency over
to Yuan Shikai on February 2, 1912, one day after the final and official
abdication of the last Manchu emperor.
Sun had wanted the capital of the republic to be in Nanjing. Because
Beijing had been the capital of two conquest dynasties (Mongol Yuan
and Manchu Qing), he and other Chinese patriots antagonistic toward
the Manchus wanted to relocate the nation's capital to a city more
identified with native Chinese rule. (Nanjing was the capital of the
early Ming and had been the capital of several native Chinese dynas-
ties during the Period of Division.) Yuan Shikai, however, wanted the
capital to be located in his base of power in Beijing, and Sun reluc-
tantly assented to this.
In one sense, Sun's republican revolution was quite decisive—it
ended over 250 years of Manchu imperial rule—but his revolution
was not thorough. China needed more than an end to the ancien
r´gime to become a functional republic: it needed a stable and func-
tional government, which unfortunately neither Sun nor Yuan could
provide. The results for China were tragic. Yuan made a mockery
out of republican rule and soon scrapped it altogether in favor of a
constitutional monarchy, with himself as head of state and head
of government. His death in 1916 did little to prevent China from
sliding into a decade of regional warlordism. Sun Yat-sen mean-
while retreated to Canton in southern China and tried in vain to
rally China and the world to his cause. He died a disappointed
and frustrated man in 1925, before his dream of seeing China
unified under a strong and modern republican government could
be realized.
YUAN'S MISRULE
Yuan Shikai turned out to be no friend of the revolution. To the dis-
gust of Sun Yat-sen and many others who had high hopes for China
after the 1911 revolution, it soon became apparent that Yuan meant to
do little more than replace the Qing dynasty with one of his own. Yuan
