chinas first revolution

How should the People’s Republic of China, founded and ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) since 1949, remember and categorize the Revolution of 1911, led by the nationalist visionary Sun Yat-sen, that overthrew the Qing monarchy? Before the Reform Era started in the late 1970s, Maoist orthodoxy labeled it a ‘bourgeois revolution’ that failed to lift Chinese people and the nation out of their misery, a task awaiting the ccp to accomplish. In recent decades, waves of rebellion among disenchanted intellectuals and party cadres against ‘grand narratives’ of any kind have swept away this position. Along with them, however, warns the iconoclastic Chinese thinker and scholar Qin Hui in his new book, some intellectual standpoints that are nevertheless essential risk being discarded. The two top endangered species on his list are any long-term historical perspective on the past and present, and any firm resistance to the spread of a complete relativism in historical judgement. These tendencies have resulted in presentations of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 as a drama in which—as he characteristically puts it in the title of his first chapter—‘The Actors Are Clearer and Clearer, while the Script Becomes Hazier and Hazier’.

As Taiwan celebrated the centennial of the revolution in 2011, of which it defines itself as the legitimate heir—claiming the proud title of the ‘first Republic’ in Asia as the roc (Republic of China)—how to treat the upheaval of that year posed tricky problems for the People’s Republic of China. Nowadays the ccp no longer offers a systematic ideological script, but it still needs to be able to justify its own revolution thirty-eight years later—and for that matter its own coming into being in 1921, a decade after the first revolution—without risking any question of a further revolution against itself. In response, party supporters advanced various new explanations of why the 1911 Revolution was a failure; while many liberal intellectuals condemned it, on the contrary, as unnecessary—wrecking the peaceful transformation of the country under way as the Manchu court embarked on constitutional reforms in 1908. In fact, calls in the late Qing period for the introduction of a constitutional monarchy, and leading thinkers like Kang Youwei (1858–1927) who issued them, have become a very fashionable topic among scholars in recent years, along with reviving interest in Confucianism.

Qin Hui’s own view of 1911 differs from all of these. Proposing a long-term historical interpretation of it, set in broad comparative framework, he argues that there is no reason for holding that the Revolution ‘failed’, let alone that it was ‘unnecessary’. On the contrary it should be regarded as a success for at least one decisive reason, that it put an end to two thousand years of imperial rule in China. Hence the title of his book, which could roughly be translated as Exiting from the Empire—so forming a nice parallel to Advancing to the Republic, a controversial tv series in 59 episodes covering the 1890–1910s, that was removed from programming after its first run in 2003. The literal sense of the two titles is, respectively, ‘walking out of’ and ‘walking towards’. Qin Hui’s defence of the revolution, unlike at least the final episodes of the tv series—earlier parts of it, in which the conservative monarchist Li Hongzhang features as a noble patriot, and Sun Yat-sen as a brittle intriguer, were more ambiguous—does not depend on projecting the republic it created as any kind of ideal. His case for the upheaval rests on research into the history that led to it. The book was an immediate success with the public, arousing heated discussions. Released in October 2015, by the end of November the authorities had ordered it to be removed from the shelves of all booksellers, before it had even reached its nominal date of publication in 2016. The identity of its author certainly had something to do with this. Originally trained as a historian of rural society and the peasantry in early imperial China, for over two decades Qin Hui has been an independent-minded public intellectual, and an often outspoken critic of the regime, publishing widely on urgently debated contemporary issues. (Readers of this journal can consult the interview with him in nlr 20 for an extended profile.)

Composition of this latest book began when Qin Hui was invited to write a column for the liberal periodical Southern Weekend in 2011 on the centennial of the Xinhai Revolution. Some more academic essays on the centennial of the New Culture Movement of 1915, which culminated in the May Fourth protests of 1919, followed. He then wrote new sections to cover broader ground for the book. The work that has resulted is a collection of fifteen chapters that essentially fall into two parts. The first of these, comprising eight chapters, sets out his interpretation of the revolution in the longue durée of Chinese history, and the ways in which it differed from the two late Qing upheavals which preceded it, the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions. The second part, taking up another seven chapters, measures the legacies of the revolution in the light of the ‘Three People’s Principles’ proclaimed by Sun Yat-sen as the founder of the Republic, and enshrined in the successive constitutions of the roc: minzu (national sovereignty), minquan (civil rights) and minsheng (popular livelihood). The whole forms a complex construction, in which there are significant differences between the two parts of the book, and also markedly within the second part, held together by a common intellectual ambition.

Known for his wide range of reading and surprising information, Qin Hui writes with a free-wheeling vigour, moving with ease and brio between the central thread of his ideas and interesting illustrations of them. He is argumentative, witty and swift. More often than not, his digressions are little ‘expeditions’ away from his main case to counter some popularly held notion. To read him is to get a glimpse of the broader intellectual landscape in China today, albeit sometimes through a glass darkly. One also senses how much he enjoys routing opponents with a tightly constructed logic, cornering them into extreme hypothetical situations. The drawback of this kind of exercise is also obvious. Too ready a resort to reductio ad absurdum can lead to historical over-simplification. These characteristic strengths and weaknesses are both on full display in his new book. Brimming with fresh ideas and provocations, and dealing with many normally separated topics, it calls for local as well as general consideration.

The best part of Zou chu dizhi are the first five chapters, which form a powerful and original argument for the historical ‘inevitability’ of the 1911 Revolution. Traditionally, the question has been formulated the other way round, as the problem of why constitutional monarchy didn’t succeed in China. Like many of those before him, Qin Hui compares China to Britain as the prototype of a constitutional monarchy—but also to Poland (a ‘republic with a king’) and Russia (a ‘semi-feudal’ society that missed becoming a constitutional regime), and in Asia to the trajectories of Japan and Thailand. Again like some of those before him, he locates the key difference in the fact that China had left a genuinely ‘feudal’ society behind long ago, whereas all the countries which produced (more or less) successful constitutional monarchies had strong feudal elements in their ancien régime before they made the transition to modernity. Unlike other scholars, however, Qin Hui does not stop here. Reversing the question with a diagnosis of the internal dynamics of the Qing, he proposes four major factors pitching the Chinese imperial polity towards an inevitable end, with or without Western intervention.

The first of these was a centralized power whose rule rested on the fear of its subjects. This, he contends, was the Legalist system introduced in defiance of Confucian principles by the first emperor Qin Shihuangdi in 220 bc, and which remained unchanged for over two thousand years. He calls this the ‘Qin polity’ (Qin zhi). In consequence, or concomitantly, the imperial throne changed hands dozens of times over the course of its history. But with extremely rare and short-lived exceptions, each ‘lasting’ royal court had no blood relation or marriage ties to its predecessor, and no royal clan lasted for much more than three centuries after the Han (202 bc–220 ad). A constitutional monarch content with his ceremonial duties alone (invariably a ‘he’ since the ninth century) was thus always improbable.

The second feature of the imperial polity in Qin Hui’s construction concerns the chronic ‘peasant revolts’ to which it was subject, a field which he has researched for more than three decades. In China the orthodox Marxist view of these uprisings has always been that they were explosions of class struggle between peasants and landowners. If an uprising targeted the ruling court, the emperor was understood to be just the ‘largest landlord’ exploiting the peasant masses. In this interpretation, peasant rebellions were the primary driver of progressive developments in China’s history, responsible for whatever positive changes took shape in the country from time to time. Citing his own findings and recent publications by fellow historians, Qin Hui contests this long-standing official position, arguing that class conflict was never the main reason for large-scale peasant revolts, and not so in the Qing times in particular. For on the one hand, archival research has shown that concentration of landed property was of limited effect on rural social structure, in part due to customs of equal division of inheritances among rich families and in part to low marriage rates among the very poor.

On the other hand, the Chinese peasantry were relatively mature economic agents from early on. Tenant-landlord relationships were already contractual from the tenth century onwards. There are plenty of disputes over these contractual arrangements in the records, but they almost never evolved into really major peasant revolts of the sort that broke out in England with the Wat Tyler Rebellion of 1381. Instead, Chinese peasant uprisings were mostly provoked by the imperial state and more often than not aimed explicitly at seizing state power. From the Yellow Turban Rebellion of the second century ad to the Taiping Rebellion of the nineteenth century, peasant leaders laid claim to be the true ‘Son of Heaven’, sent down by celestial authority to replace the existing false and corrupted one. In fact, across millennia most substitutions of one dynasty by another occurred in the immediate aftermath of a major peasant uprising—a pattern, he implies, related to the inability of the ‘Qin polity’ to manage the country in continuous prosperity for much longer than two hundred years.

The third feature of Qin Hui’s construction, closely related to the first two, is a pattern that was most pronounced during large-scale peasant uprisings and dynastic changes. It was ruthless mass murder by all sides, to an astonishing extent repeated throughout China’s long history. Citing the authoritative multi-volume demographic history of China—Zhongguo renkoushi, vols i–vii, Shanghai, 2000–05—the picture he paints is chilling. Roughly speaking, in three periods, the first stretching from the end of the Former Han to the end of the Song, each change of the ruling court saw a demographic decline of 50–60 per cent—half of the population dying in the turmoil (not just killings, but also famines and epidemics) of dynastic transition. Thereafter, the rate fell to between a quarter and a fifth, though deaths in absolute numbers remained comparable, given increased population. The last catastrophe on this scale was the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), during which some 70 million people perished. These disasters, Qin Hui argues, cannot be attributed to external conditions like the Little Ice Age or Black Death familiar in European demographic history, though poor harvests and pestilence certainly struck China too. Rather they were, in his view, rooted in an autocratic polity that made dynastic rulers and peasant challengers alike ruthless in their drive for power, and once in possession of it, merciless in its exercise. That calamitous pattern remained unaltered until the 1911 Revolution, when for the first time ‘regime change’ was accompanied by steady population growth, from 436 million in 1910 to almost 542 million in 1949.

What brought about this demographic change in the twentieth century? The fourth component of Qin Hui’s construction lies in the alternative models of rule that came into view in the nineteenth century, when Western forms of modern political organization—be it constitutional monarchy, republicanism or democracy—became known in China. For it was then, he maintains, that the Chinese began to recognize that there were different ways in the world of running a country, which could realize far more effectively than the ‘Qin polity’ ever had the Confucian vision of an ideal society long cherished by the literati. But whereas conventional approaches to the history of modern Chinese thought have tended to focus on pioneering reform-minded thinkers, Qin Hui singles out conservative figures who gained some experience abroad but vehemently opposed reforms back home in the 1870s. Notwithstanding these people’s cynical performances in public, in private letters and diaries they were full of admiration for the way politics and social life were managed in Britain and the us. By the early 1900s, however, there was no longer any need for envoys stationed abroad to conceal their views in the official memoranda they submitted to the imperial government—Qin Hui gives as an example the positive portrayal of a peaceful demonstration of Austrian labour in Vienna. The direction of the time had by then been set. Once alternatives became visible, it was all but impossible to lull people back into their state of enchantment. The days of the ‘Qin polity’ were inevitably numbered.

Along the way, Qin Hui responds in his lively style to many a topic of fierce debate in recent years, arguing for example that the late Qing ‘reformers’ were as prone to deploy violence as the ‘revolutionaries’, and that the 1911 Revolution in China was far less bloody than the Meiji ‘Reforms’ of 1868 and after. It is when, however, he comes to the way Western societies offered alternative models of political life to the Chinese, that he turns up the polemical heat. What made late-nineteenth century scholar-officials suddenly so appreciative of constitutionalism and republicanism, if for two millennia they had been faithful servants of an autocracy that knew of nothing but despotism? It was all thanks to classical Confucianism, Qin Hui replies. Tensions between Legalism and classic Confucianism never ceased, even if most literati morphed into ‘Legalist Confucians’. But the better ones resisted, preserving the true values of the sages of antiquity. ‘Throughout history’, he writes, ‘the truly great Confucians almost always showed the utmost fortitude, striving to make a difference despite their pessimistic assessment of the times.’ Among educated Chinese, the legacy of this line of ancient Confucianism preserved the commonly shared values of all human societies: compassion, empathy, benevolence, virtue and justice. ‘So long as we are not talking about international relations and not denying the need to resist imperial aggression’, he admonishes his readers, one must admit that the domestic polity of Western countries was far closer than the one back home to the Confucian ideal of a moralistic Golden Age in antiquity.

In a famous formulation, a historian of an older generation, Ho Ping-ti (1917–2012), characterized the Chinese imperial state as ‘ornamentally Confucian and substantively Legalist’. Qin Hui would like to free ‘true, classic’ Confucianism from any responsibility for millennia of political autocracy. But the improbability of any constitutional monarchy in China, on which he insists, was always clearly connected with the rigid traditional hierarchy ordering relations between ruler and subject (as also father and son, husband and wife) taken for granted as normative by Confucius and codified in Song times. In theory, ministers were never supposed to exercise the kind of powers they would enjoy in a constitutional monarchy. In practice, as Ray Huang has shown in his study of bureaucratic dynamics under the late Ming (1587, a Year of No Significance: the Ming Dynasty in Decline), an emperor might well leave most of the duties of state to his ministers. But this was never sanctioned in theory, and the Qing court in particular never relaxed its grip on government. Manchu emperors devoted themselves to war and administration, as did their regents when the emperor was a minor, and in the last years of the dynasty a court that was still clinging to substantive power at the expense of the bureaucracy, frustrated the majority of the scholar-official class, contributing to popular resentment of the monarchy and hatred of the ethnic intruders.

After his account of the traditional imperial polity, Qin Hui turns to evaluation of the paths the Chinese went on to take in the twentieth century. Here he more than once stretches his arguments too far to be persuasive. Two pairs of concepts become central. One is the opposition he constructs between ‘Westernization’ and ‘modernization’; the other is the contrast he draws between wenhua (culture) and zhidu (polity or institutional structure). Zhidu determines the range of customary choices available to groups or individuals, wenhua the customs they choose. Westernization signifies one particular set of customary preferences, and so is a question of culture. Modernization means the reconstruction of zhidu to accommodate differences in such cultural choices. Having located China’s previous problems in the legacy of the First Emperor, and formulated an eternal antagonism between Legalism and a not very well defined species of ‘classic’ Confucianism, Qin Hui contends that in the process of political modernization, Western ideas of good government could have joined forces with this brand of Confucianism against the long-standing Legalist practice of despotism, and that for more than half a century the two were indeed able to merge and lend a supporting hand to the 1911 Revolution when it came. Unfortunately, both before and after the revolution, there were always counter-currents that, instead of working to change zhidu, gave priority to changing wenhua, often targeting Confucianism as the top enemy of progress. In his view this was completely wrong-headed and did lasting damage to the country, all the way down to our own time. At the outset of his sixth chapter, indeed, Qin Hui quotes his own parable about the ‘Cultural Fever’ of the 1980s, as if it illuminates what follows. In a play on a famous episode in Sima Qian’s history, in which an assassin failed to kill the future First Emperor, he said that the ‘assassin’ of our time had turned his dagger on Confucius as a conveniently weaker target, out of fear of the real mighty one, and when the mighty one consolidated its power, started to sing its praises, completely betraying his namesake duty.

How does this fable inform the comparison of the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, and the 1911 Revolution to which Qin Hui then proceeds? According to him, although it shared many features with traditional peasant revolts of the past, the Christian-inspired Taiping Rebellion censored all books except their own feeble creations, less than a hundred titles, severely banning in particular the Confucian classics, in a peculiar, savagely superstitious and cruel version of ‘Westernization’. In contrast, the Boxers who targeted Christian missionaries and their Chinese converts were encouraged and manipulated by the Manchu court to counter the assertive intervention of the Western powers in China’s politics in the late 1890s. Qin Hui summarizes the upshot, as he sees it:

After the Taiping Rebellion’s ‘Westernization without modernization’ and the Boxer Rebellion’s ‘anti-Westernization without upholding Confucianism’, the painful lessons of these two ‘cultural revolutions’, opposite in orientations but common in premises (they were each ‘militant revolutions’ that never tried to revolutionize the institutional foundations of the country), were learnt. By the eve of the 1911 Revolution the Chinese realized that the nation’s problem lay not in its ‘culture’, but in its authoritarian polity.

However, if it makes sense to view the Boxer Rebellion as hostile to Westernization, to describe the Taiping as campaigners for ‘cultural Westernization’ is far-fetched. As Qin Hui himself notes, the main reason that the Taiping were able to mobilize such widespread social support, across more than a dozen of China’s most populated provinces, was because they attacked Manchu rule politically and inequality socially, rather than calling for Westernization as such. Their doctrine may have been based in part on a millenarian adaptation of Christian notions, though as Qin Hui points out it was the Western powers that ensured they were crushed by the ancien régime. But their primary target was the ‘Qin’ rulers of the day, draped as of old in the ideological garb of Confucianism, from which Qin Hui would like to separate them. In this misconceived construction, Qin Hui is obliged by his argument to define ‘culture’ so narrowly that it excludes the very ferment of ideas that played such a critical role in preparing the 1911 Revolution in his own earlier account of it, when serious translation of Western books—not just constitutional treatises, but works of science, philosophy, economics, sociology and literature—for the first time flooded the shelves and desks of China’s educated class. Inevitably, the logic of such a narrowing obscures the inseparable connection between cultural change in the broadest sense, which includes customary ways of life that are always informed by beliefs—in other words: traditional ideas—and the possibility of political modernization. Changing ideas, whether codified in sacred texts or embedded in popular customs, is a precondition of changing institutions.

Zou chu dizhi changes register when Qin Hui moves in the second part of the book to consider what he regards as the principal upshots of the 1911 Revolution. He explains in his preface that he decided to assess its outcome under the rubric of Sun Yat-sen’s principles. Scrambling their officially consecrated order, he looks in an opening chapter at the evolution of the economy under the Republic, devotes the next three to its diplomatic record, and ends the book with a final trio relating to civil rights. In this procession, the keynote of his treatment of minsheng and minzu is emphasis on the continuities between the economic and diplomatic performance of the Republic with that of the People’s Republic that followed it. Qin Hui states that his purpose is simply to set the record straight. But, of course, the continuities for which he argues are subversive of the official ideology of the prc, the propaganda of which has always insisted that the revolution of 1949 marked a complete rupture between the two. Since the repression of the urban uprising of 1989, however, the survival of the party has depended on banning any hint of class conflict for the new mantras of stability, economic development, and national rejuvenation, to the point where every single Manchu emperor has been presented in lavish prime-time serials on Central Television as heroic, caring, daring embodiments of virtue and justice. Qin Hui taunts this political turn by asking: how could the Qing be so excellent, appearing to require no call whatsoever for a revolution to overthrow them, whereas the roc is still portrayed as a regime so full of darkness and disaster that the ccp had to launch its own revolution to save the nation? It is this part of the book that was probably the reason why the censors decided to remove it from public view.

Qin Hui argues that the Party’s line distorts historical reality in many ways. It is true that the roc period was full of internal rifts and external threats, starting with warlords fighting each other and culminating in the eight-year war against Japan’s invasion, followed by full-blown civil war thereafter. Political instability reduced society’s defences against natural disasters, worsening popular suffering. Still, it is one thing to say the newborn roc was hard put to deal effectively with all the problems it faced. It is a completely different matter, and incorrect, to say that all the troubles were caused by the 1911 Revolution. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the Qing had entered a downward spiral typical of the long-term pattern of dynastic changes. In this respect, the roc period was more comparable to the turbulent intervals of transition from one dynasty to another than to any time of peaceful prosperity—a comparison, however, that works in its favour, since the 1911 Revolution saw the least violent end to any dynasty in Chinese history, and was the first to be followed by a continuous growth, rather than precipitous fall, in population.

Furthermore, to assess economic development is, in Qin Hui’s view, to calculate it over a given area for a given period, bracketing its price—human, social or environmental—in recognition of the fact that, although wars and natural disasters may destroy human life and material wealth, it is rare for a civilizational level or accumulated cultural maturity to regress to a less developed state. Revolutions can transform an old, or create an entirely new, political order, but the economy will inevitably develop on the basis it had reached under the previous regime. There are consequently no grounds for the prc’s habitual claim that all of its economic achievements from the 1950s on were written on a blank slate, or the practice among its academics of measuring its growth against the war ruins of 1945, or the pre-war period without counting the territory occupied by the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in the 1930s and 40s. Seriously considered, economic change should be reckoned, temporally, against peak production in time of peace; and spatially, against all the areas comprising the contemporary territory of the state.

According to these criteria, the prc’s economic achievements should be measured against the roc level of 1936, in the same way as before the Second World War the ussr calculated its own against the Tsarist level of 1913, and after the war against that of 1940, according to changed territorial boundaries in the different periods. The roc should be measured in the same way against the Qing record. Figures for Manchukuo ought therefore to be included in any comparison of the Republican period with the prc, notwithstanding the fact that the heavy industrial base built by the Japanese in the Northeast was part and parcel of their military machine and used Chinese slave labour. Consumption was relentlessly held down in Manchukuo, to the detriment of the whole regional society.

Allowing for these corrections, a relevant comparator for the roc would be India under British rule, which was at peace in the same years. Citing Angus Maddison, whose historical estimates for the two countries may have been overstated, but are valid for the purposes of a Sino-Indian comparison, Qin Hui concludes that from 1913 to 1936 China achieved higher growth rates than India, before it was overwhelmed by war with Japan. However, as the starting point was extremely low, the overall standing of the roc’s economy in the world was far behind industrial powers. This last point, in turn, concerns the question of how to assess the Qing economy, in recent years often praised to the skies by economic historians. Its realities, he argues, have been obscured by a superstition that he calls ‘surplus worship’. It is widely believed that China’s economy was at a far higher level before the Opium War than most parts of the world, as indicated in part by its huge trade surplus, the root cause of the War. However, economic figures show that China’s trade surplus ran at an even higher level, and the opium trade continued, in the 1880s. Did that mean China’s economy became stronger after the war, not to speak of the wreckage left by the Taiping Rebellion? Obviously not. Thereafter, China started to post a modest deficit in the 1890s, which by the early 1930s had soared. But this was the opposite of a regression, since the Republic’s deficit was in good part due to the import of industrial goods for which no market existed under the Qing.

After this chapter—one of the best demonstrations of Qin Hui’s ability to deal with complicated issues, data in hand, in a logical and original way—there follows a more extended consideration of the changes in China’s diplomatic standing and the challenges to its territorial integrity under the Republic. The former, he argues, saw notable progress. The country’s international standing went up steadily under both the Northern Warlord governments in Beijing (1911–27), and the kmt regime in Nanjing which succeeded them in 1928. The First World War proved a stroke of luck for China, for in joining the side of the Entente, it was able (after gaining nothing at Versailles) to land a seat at the League of Nations and win modest concessions from the great powers at the Washington Conference in 1921, the first since the Opium Wars. Taking over this legacy, the kmt achieved tariff autonomy in 1929, and by forging an alliance with the United States in the Pacific War, secured the annulment of most of the unequal treaties in 1942 and a permanent seat in the Security Council of the un in 1945.

In these years, nevertheless, China’s territorial integrity was under threat from two of the countries that had taken part in the Boxer Expedition of 1900—notoriously Japan, but also Russia. Qin Hui passes rapidly over the former, on the grounds that its record of aggression is well known. Russia is another story. Under Lenin, the Soviet Union offered to annul the unequal treaties the Tsarist regime had extorted from China, but after his death Moscow held onto its stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway running across the northernmost Chinese province of Heilongjiang, and the spur linking its provincial capital of Harbin to the coastal city of Dalian (Port Arthur), with a lease lasting for another thirty-two years. Not long after, however, it sold the southern half of the railway to Japan for a handsome sum, and when Zhang Xueliang, the warlord controlling Manchuria, tried to seize the northern stretch, Moscow sent in heavily armoured troops that destroyed much of Zhang’s army. Nor, when the other major powers renounced their privileges in China in 1942, did Stalin follow suit. Instead, at Yalta in early 1945, he demanded a new treaty with China transferring control of the southern half of the railway, along with its deep-water port, back from Japan to the ussr. After 1915 this was the only case, Qin Hui remarks, where a new unequal treaty was forced on China, until it was voluntarily cancelled by Khrushchev in 1955.

In the far west of Xinjiang, meanwhile, the roc lacked any control over the successive Han warlords who ruled the Uyghur Muslim population of the province, each as ruthless as the next. Soviet Central Asia was much closer to it than Nanjing, and for long Moscow had a conspicuously greater presence in the region, until in 1940 the current warlord Sheng Shicai, who had previously even held a secret party card of the cpsu, decided that the German invasion was about to topple Stalin and switched sides, driving out Soviet personnel, killing scores of ccp cadres who had been working there, including the younger brother of Mao Zedong, and taking his semi-independent kingdom back to the roc. In response, once the German armies were rolled back in Russia, Stalin encouraged the formation of a breakaway East Turkestan Republic in the north of the province that lasted from 1944 to 1949, abandoning it only when Mao, during his two-month visit to Moscow in 1950, made it clear that the new-born prc would not renounce Chinese sovereignty over Xinjiang, a claim which the roc had never let go.

To the south, Qin Hui reports cases where the defeat of Japan at the end of the Pacific War allowed the Republic to make China a force to be reckoned with. In August 1945, allocated reception of the surrender of Japanese forces in Vietnam north of the 16th parallel, the Nanjing government dispatched 150,000 troops to occupy Tonkin, whose presence prevented the French from restoring colonial control of the north for nine months, furnishing protection for Ho Chi Minh to set up a Vietminh government in Hanoi. Soon after, the roc issued the eleven-dash line proclaiming China’s sovereignty over the islands of the South China Sea, backed by the dispatch of four warships—the origin of the frontier the prc upholds today. With this success Qin Hui rounds off his account of the Republic’s achievements in realizing Sun’s first principle of minzu.

These chapters come with plenty of narrated episodes, leaving an impression of an overall historical account of the subject. But the speaking voice here has a much stronger tone than in the section on the economy, and the evidence is plainly selective. Han nationalism, equated with a collective interest, is taken for granted in confident Sino-centric style. Qin Hui understands that political forces in a weak, semi-colonial China often had to seek foreign support in one way or another. But he picks what he wants from the record. The boundaries of the Qing empire, conquered by colonial-style expeditions in Central Asia, are never questioned. Popular nationalism among the Mongols or the Uyghurs disappears from his account without a trace. All that remains are the endless intrigues of Russian imperial ambition, using Mongols and Xinjiang Muslims for its own purposes against China’s interest. He even goes so far as to suggest that Mongolia, which declared its independence as early as 1912 without any prompting from St Petersburg, was an illegitimate loss to the Republic. No balanced treatment of the Soviet role in the history of the roc is attempted. Much is made of Russian control of the Manchurian railway, without mention of the fact that in 1924 the Soviet Union was the first power to renounce extra-territorial concessions in China, or the storming by Zhang Xueliang, with Chiang Kai-shek’s explicit support, of the Soviet consulate in Harbin on ideological grounds, to root out socialist propaganda and trade-union activism, before the Red Army came to punish him. Most strikingly, not a word is said of the indispensable part played by Soviet arms and military advisers in the Northern Expedition that overthrew the warlord regime in Beijing in the 20s, creating the first modern government with a more or less unified national authority across the country—a far more significant Russian intervention in the history of the Republic than anything touched on by Qin Hui. As for Nanjing’s subsequent claim to the South China seas, at the time all its neighbours in the area were colonies of Western powers. But in writing as if this were the end of the matter, when today these are independent states which dispute Chinese claims to islands that are considerably closer to them than to the prc, he exposes himself to criticism of an uncharacteristic conformism.

In the final section of Zou chu dizhi, Qin Hui turns to the question of minquan—civil rights, or in an alternative translation of Sun Yat-sen’s term, democracy. The reader is immediately confronted with a surprise. Whereas Qin Hui’s discussion of the economic and diplomatic records of the Republic goes up to 1936 and 1949 respectively, the story here stops short around 1922. The reason for this is that he devotes all three of his chapters to the New Culture Movement, which lasted from 1917 to 1921, hereafter—as in Chinese short-hand—‘May Fourth’ (not to be confused with the student protest of 4 May 1919 against the Treaty of Versailles, a political episode that gave its name to the intellectual trends that preceded and outlasted it). Thematically, Qin Hui’s treatment of this is so closely connected to arguments about the late Qing he makes early on in the book, before he gets to the Republic, that logically it should have followed them there, rather than being separated at such a distance from them. Nor do they follow his chapters on minsheng or minzu in other ways. Not only in temporality but also in tone they are discrepant. Whereas the roc’s economic record and national salvation projects are credited with considerable accomplishments, his treatment of May Fourth is highly critical, filled with laments and regrets at the wrong path it set.

Already in dealing with the last years of Manchu rule, Qin Hui gives repeated indications that in criticizing misguided rejections of Confucianism, he intends to take above all the New Culture Movement to task. In contrasting the Taiping and Boxer upheavals with the 1911 Revolution, he repeatedly brackets May Fourth with them as examples of aiming at the wrong target, insisting that what China needed, and still needs, is not to reform its culture, as if it were ‘backward’, but to modernize its polity. Why then did May Fourth attack Confucianism and it alone, saying nothing about Legalism, the true culprit for the ‘Qin polity’ that oppressed China for so long? Yet his treatment of May Fourth cannot lead in quite such a straight line to the same conclusion as his type-casting of the two peasant revolts. Being the talented historian he is, he raises some interesting questions along the way. For example, against the conventional understanding that it was humiliation by the West in the two Opium Wars that shocked the Chinese into starting on their various attempts at reform, he argues that the real driving force behind these attempts was not shame or fear, which came only later under the roc, but rather excitement and inspiration coming from encounters with the West. Similarly, he disagrees with the view that May Fourth advocacy of individual emancipation did not go far enough because it was overwhelmed by the priority of national salvation (jiuwang yadao qimeng). Citing a keyword study based on digitalized big data by two leading scholars of modern Chinese intellectual history, he contends that in the aftermath of the Great War what emerged as a parallel topic to individual liberation for the New Culture campaigners was socialism rather than patriotism.

That said, Qin Hui’s treatment of May Fourth is skewed by his determination to force it back into his over-riding dichotomy of Legalism versus Confucianism. The leading voices of May Fourth were mostly trained in Japan, he maintains, where they picked up the Japanese-style individualism of the Meiji period. But it so happened that Japanese intellectuals contributed to the Meiji Restoration by reviving the Chinese ancient Legalism against Confucian dominance in the late Tokugawa period. Their Chinese pupils then forgot the difference between the two societies, one moving from its feudal stage to a centralized monarchical state and the other already in that centralized state for two millennia. Japanese reformers sought to release individuals from their former feudal bonds in order to become subjects of the Emperor with a direct, exclusive allegiance to him—that was how Japan was marched into an aggressive militarist state in the first half of the twentieth century. Transferring this account to China, Qin Hui resorts to guilt by association, recounting a late Qing debate between old-style Confucians insisting on rituals and family ties on one side, and on the other a group of Japan-trained scholars and Japanese advisors, quoting Legalist texts and arguing that individuals should be freed from local ties to devote their entire loyalty to the emperor and a would-be militarized new state. No such discourse, however, can be found in May Fourth writings—one isolated favourable reference by Lu Xun, following his mentor Zhang Taiyan, to Qin Shihuangdi will scarcely suffice.

In general, it is noticeable that in dealing with May Fourth, Qin Hui’s writing becomes uncharacteristically evasive and contorted. At times he inserts a disclaimer that he believes there is any direct cause-and-effect connection between May Fourth and what happened half a century later (the Cultural Revolution), or what is happening today. He does acknowledge that May Fourth intellectuals twice rejected attempts to restore the monarchy, in 1916 and 1917, and even admits they did not call for the individual to be loosened from ties of family or locality in order to serve the country’s supreme ruler. Yet he still complains that May Fourth thinkers urged individuals to serve the abstract collective of the Nation, the State, or the People, without providing any evidence for this charge. At the most, he convicts Chen Duxiu, a leading figure of the New Culture Movement who became the first general secretary of the ccp, of lamenting—as Sun Yat-sen did before him—the tendency of the Chinese to selfishness, a multitude like a vast sheet of sand, with no sense of collective responsibility or public spirit.

Notwithstanding all his qualifications, moreover, the function of Qin Hui’s lengthy detours to Japan and the late Qing is to reiterate the charge that May Fourth launched an unwarranted attack on Confucianism, informed by Japanese ideas, which led to the return to a Legalist-style ‘Qin polity’ that suppressed individual liberties ruthlessly. The effect of China’s New Culture Movement was to spread a ‘vitiated individualism, destroying small-scale communities to pave the way for state militarism’. What was its impact on ordinary people’s lives? For a reply, he ventriloquizes a female voice:

‘I am against patriarchal authority and against imperial power. Yet though I could demand freedom from my family and clan, I cannot speak in the same way of freedom in the face of the “Nation”; I cannot accept being married off for the benefit of my family, but I am told it is right that I should marry to serve the “interests of the People”’. At the time, opposing a marriage arranged by the family to serve its advantage and then accepting a marriage arranged by the ‘Organization’ on behalf of the ‘People’, was a common enough phenomenon.

The Chinese term for marriage used in this passage is of female application only. In the only place where Qin Hui is gender-specific, he is using women’s experience to accuse May Fourth of leading people down the wrong path of life. But the ‘phenomenon’ of which he writes has nothing to do with May Fourth; it occurred under the ccp in time of war and after. Why should May Fourth, contradicting his disclaimers, be held responsible for wrong-doings of the ccp decades later? Elsewhere he does reaffirm that modernization means, as Marx believed, social transformation from smaller communities to increasingly large ones. Yet here he writes as if he would rather see Chinese women reverting to family life under Confucian patriarchal authority.

Qin Hui is no doubt entitled to criticize the New Culture Movement for not arriving at the ultimate truths about individual freedom, but not to advance the absurd accusation that May Fourth helped to bring back a Legalist ‘Qin polity’ in the form of a new collective authority over individuals. He ends his book by reiterating that modern China’s real moment of enlightenment came in the late Qing, when people’s attention was focused on zhidu instead of wenhua, the weakest element in his construction. What is glaringly missing is any account at all of the real suppressors of individual freedom in the Republic: the kmt with its police persecutions and assassinations. At most there is a passing reference to the ‘party-state’ set up by the kmt, not in the section on the fate of civil rights, but the one on the evolution of economy. The reader would have no idea that it was leading lights of May Fourth—Lu Xun and Cai Yuanpei among them—who set up a Chinese Alliance for the Protection of Civil Rights against the repressions of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, the absolute opposite of Qin Hui’s depiction of them.

With this major exception, Zou chu dizhi is on the whole a very impressive book. In less than 400 pages, the wide range of issues covered is remarkable. In his preface, Qin Hui says modestly that modern Chinese history is not his trained field, implying that the views he will express may not be up to a full scholarly standard. The end result is uneven, in part simply because collecting published essays has left its usual untidy footprint in the final product, which does not claim to be a comprehensive work. But there are original ideas in abundance, delivered in an attractive style, part of whose appeal lies in an ability to engage with critics over important issues that is rare for a Chinese intellectual of his generation. Politically, he emerges as a liberal of realist temperament and social sympathies, distrustful of the ‘Russian-style socialism’ he blames May Fourth for turning towards, and committed to a constitutional order which he describes at one point as the general direction towards which all societies in the world are moving. Few contemporary Chinese thinkers are so distinctive in manner and outlook. Yet it is noticeable that in this work he also displays two tendencies that are widely shared across the political spectrum in the prc today: an uncritical acceptance of Han nationalism, and an idealized conception of classical Confucianism. With rare exceptions, in all countries—and for understandable reasons, especially former or semi-colonial societies—intelligentsias have been reluctant to problematize their nations, so there is nothing unusual in this. So, too, the wish to put traditions of the past to contemporary service, regardless of historical accuracy. In the prc, Confucius is an empty signifier claimed by every stripe of political outlook—right, centre or left—available for whatever institutional and ideological filling is preferred. Qin Hui’s ‘true’ Confucianism is one among many brands competing for the same name. How seriously it should be taken is another matter. Constitutionalism has been a forbidden topic in China for several years. In clothing his case for it in the robes of the Sage, how far has he deliberately tailored it to avoid causing the attention of the censors? Or has he accommodated an oppressive intellectual environment subconsciously? Had there not been political censorship, would Confucianism have still occupied the place it does in this book, or is it a conclusion long since reached from the study of traditional society? These are questions that, since the book has been banned, we cannot ask him to answer straightforwardly. What is not in question is that this rich text deserves further and open discussion by the Chinese themselves.