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2 results

  • 9 - The Failure of Constitutional Reforms and Republican Revolution

  • Chenggang Xu, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    Institutional Genes
    Published online:
    03 June 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025, pp 392-448
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  • Summary

    Constitutionalism and communist totalitarianism are both foreign ideologies and institutions that were imported into China. The failure of China’s attempts at constitutionalism cleared the path for the rise of communist totalitarianism. This chapter examines the shortcomings of the constitutional reforms and the Republican Revolution, as dictated by China’s institutional genes of the time. It reviews the ineffective Hundred Days’ Reform and the impact of Social Darwinism, which found deep roots in China’s institutional genes and profoundly influenced the later Chinese reception of communist totalitarianism. The text also discusses the unsuccessful constitutional reforms that lacked popular support and chronicles the collapse of the Qing Empire following the Xinhai Revolution. Additionally, the chapter analyzes the failures of the Republican Revolution, attributing them to the absence of those institutional genes necessary for establishing constitutionalism as well as to the enduring institutional gene of “secret societies,” which deeply influenced the revolutionary parties.

  • 1 - Introduction: Maritime and continental in China's history

  • Edited by John K. Fairbank
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of China
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 September 1983, pp 1-27

  • Summary

    The 37 years from 1912 to 1949 are known as the period of the Chinese Republic. This chapter discusses one of the major historical issues, events and Chinese achievements in these various realms. Some of the seemingly 'foreign influences' on the Republican Revolution have coincided with or grown from older Chinese trends that shared certain traits with the foreigners. The chapter indicates the dimensions of this historical problem. It also tries to establish the identity and trace the growth of Maritime China, a peripheral region along the south-east coast. The growth of treaty-port trade in China brought with it the new technology of transport and industry, a new knowledge of foreign nations, and so a growth of nationalism. The rebel tradition, secret and fanatical, had been too often in the negative guise of Boxerism, profoundly anti-intellectual and likely to degenerate into local feuding.