CHAPTER FIFTEEN

DID CHINA HAVE A FIN DE SIÈCLE?

Maura Dykstra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom

It is a principle of things that the new is strong, but the old weak . . . (Kang Youwei 1898) The words “Old” and “New” should be strictly prohibited altogether. (Dowager Empress Cixi 1901) Our task today [involves] intense combat between the old and the modern . . . (Chen Duxiu 1916)

ne of the tasks of women’s history,” Joan Kelly claimed at the start of an “Oinfl uential essay, “is to call into question accepted schemes of periodization” (Kelly 1986). The same is true for world history. Too often, the names of periods are used as though they have universal relevance and resonance, yet turn out on closer inspection to apply, or at least only apply fully, to the experience of historical actors located in one or two regions. Hence the title of this piece: an homage to that of Kelly’s oft-reprinted 1977 essay that asked: “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” When invited to contribute to this volume, we thought it important to start out with an agnostic attitude, rather than assume that China had a fi n-de-siècle experience circa 1900 that was similar in meaningful ways to that which unfolded in Europe and North America. Taking this approach was to risk looking a gift horse – in this case, an invitation to contribute to a fascinating volume – in the mouth. For had we concluded that the answer was “no,” we would have had to pull out of the publication. Fortunately for us, this was not the case. China did, we believe, have a fi n de siècle. This is in some ways a surprising conclusion, given how far removed China was from Europe and North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was not just distant geographically and culturally but also chronologically. For reasons we explain in detail below, most people living in the domain governed by the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) simply did not think, as their counterparts in the West did, that a major temporal shift would occur with the dawn or end of the year 1900. Even more precisely, the year 1900 did not exist in the mind of the average Chinese individual. Very few subjects of the Qing Empire were concerned with hundred-year periods; cycles of sixty, rather than one hundred, years loomed larger in the classical Chinese

238 — Did China have a fin de siècle? — calendar. Moreover, while the movement from one century to the next in the West has tended to imply a progression of accumulated years based on a common starting point, the Chinese sixty-year jiazi cycles, by contrast, were not numbered successively. At the end of each cycle, a new one began again in a never-ending repetition. Rather than relying on the numerical tallying of years in infi nite progress starting from a “zero” point, the passage of historical time in China was marked by numbering the years within each reigning period of the imperial house. The two cycles that combined to produce notions of time in Qing China were thus capable of marking the shift from one year to the next, and of pinpointing time in a progression of emperors spanning thousands of years of recorded history. It was not capable of communicating the idea of a fi n de siècle linked to the year 1900. We stress this contrast in approaches to chronology for a reason: the difference between centuries and Chinese time cycles makes it all the more unusual that some of the events of the fi nal years of the Qing and fi rst years of the Republican period (1912–49) did in fact have Western parallels. Before going further, though, we want to make clear that, while we see good reason to highlight this temporal disjuncture, we do not subscribe to the once popular notion of a changeless China completely disconnected from the West. Nor do we think that the absence of a strictly numerical and linear notion of time in China precluded thought about progress or promoted a backward-looking obsession with recapturing past golden ages. These are misleading notions, which have had very long half-lives in part due to how they were embraced by major social theorists, including Hegel, Marx, and Weber. China has always been changing and has never been completely stagnant; it was often more linked to global trends than the European nations that would later claim to represent the global good; and as important as veneration for ancient ways often was, there were active traditions as well of reform, including ones that used allusion to the past as a cloak for arguing for novel ways to do things, much as leading fi gures in the French Revolution used appeals to Greece and Rome to legitimate and explain their creation of new political forms. This being said, in the late 1800s, Chinese intellectual and artistic trends were often out of step with European and North American ones, and so, too, were Chinese senses of time. Even when Western styles fl owed to China, they often did so along a syncopated timeline, with European and North American fi gures and works making their mark on Chinese writers and artists only after they had ceased to be fashionable and novel in their home milieu. (To cite just one of many possible examples, Jules Verne made his greatest impact in China not in the 1870s and 1880s, when his biggest bestsellers were in vogue in the West, but in the early 1900s.) Just as the writings and thoughts of European intellectuals became popular in China long after they were no longer in vogue in other parts of the world, so too was China only developing the merest sense of what a fi n de siècle could possibly mean at the turn of the twentieth century, when few people living in the Qing Empire had begun to reckon years according to the calendar popular in Europe and the United States. In spite of all this, after considering the question in our title from different angles, we have grown convinced that China, although distant from the West in both geographical and chronological terms at the close of the nineteenth century, can be brought into a volume such as this one in more than an artifi cial way, and perhaps even should be brought into it, for doing so has the potential to show how

239 — Maura Dykstra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom — widely distributed some phenomena were in and around 1900. In doing so, how- ever, it is important to begin by settling on two analytical conditions to frame the exercise, both of which have been foreshadowed in the trio of quotes used to open this piece. The fi rst condition involves treating the fi n-de-siècle period as lasting through the 1910s (as others have also proposed). This allows us to connect the Chinese experience in the late 1890s to the period that closed with the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1912 and the experience of the fi rst years of China’s fi rst Republic. In this formulation, China’s fi n de siècle concludes with the opening developments of the New Culture Movement (1915–23) in which Chen Duxiu, the last person we quote above, was a major fi gure. The second condition involves narrowing down the fi eld of inquiry associated with the wider realm of fi n-de-siècle studies. Rather than try to compare China’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiences across a wide spectrum of historical happenings across the globe at the time, we have chosen to focus instead on how changing notions of time and novelty emerged over this span. This focus has allowed us to eschew a pro-forma approach to defi ning the fi n-de-siècle moment in China, and instead seize upon an essential component of the zeitgeist of the Western fi n de siècle: the growing sense of an imminent temporal rift. In the following pages, we consider how China in particular grappled with an increasing sensitivity to tension between ideas of the old and the new, the traditional and the experimental. If one follows this approach in exploring China’s late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fi n-de-siècle experience well worthy of the name and fi t for comparative discussion emerges. We are not the fi rst to assert this; in doing so we follow in the footsteps of, among others, David Der-Wei Wang, a leading scholar of Chinese literature. His infl uential study Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Wang 1997) is the most important single effort to date to probe the issues of interest to us here, and we encourage readers who want to learn more about what we say below to consult Wang’s book. In the pages that follow, we zero in on the push and pull between old and new before and after 1900. We will also note, though, how chronological understanding and other things set the Chinese experience apart from contemporaneous Western ones. We begin by grounding our efforts with a section surveying Chinese ideas regarding chronology. We then move on to one that explores the challenges that the Qing political and intellectual worlds faced between 1800 and 1895. After that, we focus on the emergence of changing visions of the new and the old from the mid- 1890s to early 1900s before concluding with a series of meditations on the New Culture Movement that closed China’s fi n-de-siècle moment, as we defi ne it, and its implications for later periods.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE TIME Forward, forward, let us range; Let the people spin forever down the ringing grooves of change; Through the shadows of the world we sweep into the younger day; Better fi fty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1869)

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On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong stood atop Tiananmen Rostrum in and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC turned 60 in 2009 . . . The 60th anniversary is the most auspicious day and a signifi cant point in a person’s life and a nation’s history. (Zhu Zhiqun 2010, 1)

It is only recently, namely since the , that hundred-year periods have mattered in China. Before that upheaval, which like many revolutions was accompanied by a shift in the way time was measured and described, periods were most often marked out in terms of the lives or reign phases of emperors (that could vary in length) or via sixty-year cycles based on a combination of the twelve zoological (and mythological) zodiacal signs and fi ve geomantic elements (wood, fi re, earth, metal, water). The symbols used to label each of these systems of twelve and of fi ve are found among the earliest pieces of Chinese writing, dating back to the Shang Dynasty (1600 bce to 1046 bce). The same cycles that marked one year from the next were also used to denote months and days. These cycles of time rotated together in an unbroken pattern from the earliest period of Chinese history down to the end of the last dynasty, the Qing. The use of an unending cycle of sixty years was anchored in human time by linking it up to imperial reigns. In the Qing, the cyclical temporal scheme was used in conjunction with a count of the number of years since the beginning of the reign of each emperor, who adopted an auspicious era title to mark the period of his rule. These two types of time, one cosmological and the other political, operated indepen- dent of one another, but confl uences in the two were causes for special celebration. The longest-lived of Qing rulers, the Qianlong Emperor, voluntarily stepped down from the throne after successfully completing a sixty-year cycle in power. This tradition of never-ending sixty-year temporal cycles combined with the rubric of dynastic time to anchor the human experience within both a cosmological and a historical framework. These two ways of telling time had no connection at all to the Roman Gregorian tradition, which only gradually spread to various parts of the world over the course of fi ve long centuries. Where the Europeans who visited China marked the beginning of a new era from the birth of Christ, Chinese time had no comparable shared notion of a starting point for historical time (though the start of new dynasties did provide medium-range temporal referents). While people in the West were ticking off the years in a steady, forward progression and the nineteenth century followed closely on the heels of the eighteenth, the Chinese cycle remembered nothing beyond a sixty-year period and did not add these cycles together in an accumulative pattern. Time was only measured in a linear progression within each cycle and each reign period. Seasonal festivals, imperial rituals, and everyday events were scheduled according to the traditional calendars. Today, a full century since the end of the last imperial dynasty, almanacs featuring information about the astrological and agricultural cycles linked to the ancient Chinese calendar can be found in Chinatowns all over the world. In China itself, although the sixty-year cycle has been supplanted by “Common Years” (gongyuan) in offi cial and popular writing, the appeal of older ways of telling time has endured. And, as one of the quotations used to open this section reminds us, sixtieth birthdays, of individuals and of larger entities, are still taken very seriously. In

241 — Maura Dykstra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom — the 1890s, when the Empress Dowager, the most powerful member of the Qing ruling family for much of her life, was about to turn sixty, big plans were made to mark the occasion with the opening of a spectacular new palace – plans that were scuttled when war broke out with Japan. Similarly, as the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC neared, the Communist Party put enormous energy into making it a mem- orable occasion. Not only were a slew of “tribute fi lms” released, including one that featured many of Hong Kong and the mainland’s most famous actors and actresses, but a glittering pageant was also staged in Beijing. This gala, orchestrated by Zhang Yimou, the same one-time independent fi lmmaker turned state choreographer respon- sible for the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, was the biggest National Day ceremony in recent history. There are many other signs of the continuing valence of sixty-year cycles, even though they sometimes now compete with hundred-year ones. There were major rituals held in 1993 to mark the centenary of Mao Zedong’s birth, for example, but there was also a great deal done late in 2013 to mark the passage of 120 years, or two 60-year cycles, since he was born (Miles 2013). The sixty-year cycle is, even today, an important way of anchoring the individual to the Chinese past. In addition to the astrological time that is linked to these cycles, and the festivals that are marked in its time, this calendar is linked to Chinese history. Not only was time itself measured in politically bounded units, but also many of the most pivotal events of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century – the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, the Boxer Rising of 1900, and so on – are referred to still at times by the characters associated with the dates on which they took place according to the traditional calendar. The 1898 calls for change are known as the reform efforts of the wuxu year, for example, while the Boxer Rising is described as the traumas of the gengzi year. Even as so many other things about China move in sync with the rest of the world, its past remains to some degree in another time zone. At the end of the nineteenth century, the notion of the Gregorian calendar had still only circulated in small circles in China. It had been introduced to the empire by Jesuit scholars in the sixteenth century, but remained an exotic, esoteric, and unusual way of reckoning time throughout the empire. Missionaries and merchants visiting China purchased calendrical guides with concordance tables to negotiate the temporal shift between the two worlds. For China, as in many other places where time had been counted in distinctive ways, the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with the history of encountering the temporal sphere of Western and more specifi cally Christian time.

CHINA’S CHALLENGING NINETEENTH CENTURY What could be better than to take Chinese ethical principles of human relations and Confucian teachings as the foundation and supplement them with the techniques of wealth and power of the various nations? (Feng Guifen 1860)

If China does not make any change at this time, how can she be on par with the great nations of Europe, and compare with them in power and strength? (Wang Tao 1870)

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To prepare for discussion of the clash between old and new in the late 1800s and early 1900s, we now offer a second context, which explores not methods of keeping time but the events that came immediately before the clash between old and new of what we are calling China’s fi n-de-siècle era. China’s traumatic experiences from 1800 until 1895, when our fi n-de-siècle period starts, matter in part because of the ways these developments began to undermine traditional reckonings of time. A con- stellation of unsettling events – some international, some purely domestic, some a mixture of both – unfolded in a succession so rapid and unprecedented that, by the close of the nineteenth century, the Qing Empire had been profoundly shaken. In the course of this century of misfortune, more and more infl uential people, including prominent thinkers and writers like the two quoted above, began to wonder if China might be lagging behind other countries. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a widening circle of discussion among Qing politicians and intellectuals began to conjecture that the empire needed to catch up with a new pack of nations leading the development of world politics. The crisis underlying these urgent calls for “Western Learning” was the product of an entire century of diffi cult trials for the Qing, which must be understood to appreciate the pitch of China’s fi n-de-siècle intellectual ferment. China’s nineteenth century had begun with the Qing Empire facing myriad chal- lenges, including piracy off the empire’s southeastern coast and various rebellions. By the 1830s, domestic instability was aggravated by diplomatic and military con- fl icts, as fi rst British and then French, American, and eventually also Japanese forces pressed the Qing to grant them commercial access, missionary freedoms, and politi- cal concessions. The fi rst Opium War and its grim conclusion with the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing marked the beginning of a series of “unequal treaties” forced on Beijing. Imperial forces clashed with foreign militaries on Chinese soil again in the second Opium War from 1856–60, which climaxed when British and French troops razed the imperial Summer Palace in retaliation for Qing kidnapping and killing of Western envoys. These Qing defeats inaugurated an era of weakness and what offi cials and intel- lectuals have referred to as a century of “national humiliation” that lasted until the 1940s, when the country regained its territorial sovereignty with the end of the last extraterritorial claims of other nations on Chinese soil. In the midst of this stagger- ing progression of political, military, and diplomatic debacles involving foreign powers, domestic strife broke out once more with the Taiping Uprising (1850–64), a destructive civil confl ict that was centered on the followers of a prophet who claimed to be Christ’s younger brother, and who had a millenarian vision of an age of “Great Peace” (Taiping) beginning as soon as the Qing Manchu “devils” were driven out of China. It was fi nally quelled but at a great cost: to suppress it, the dynasty drained state coffers, gave local military commanders increased autonomy, and even appealed to and made use of Western troops, as foreign powers decided they preferred to see a weakened Qing stay afl oat than deal with insurgents who embraced such a wildly eccentric version of Christianity. When peace returned, the Qing launched a wholesale reassessment of military, economic, and fi scal policies. The result was a set of initiatives – known to historians as the Self-Strengthening (ziqiang) movement – that laid the foundation for increased, albeit still limited, interaction with and adoption of Western technologies and philosophies.

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From 1861 to 1895, the Qing and leading offi cials carried out a two-prong pursuit of development, whose watchword was fuqiang (wealth and power) and whose goal was raising China back up to par with other great empires (Schell and Delury 2013). During this period, most projects were military in character. New army drills and training for troops were adapted from models offered by advisors from Western nations. There was also a tentative embrace of modern industry; some emphasis put on learning about Western science; and, for the fi rst time, government support for students going abroad. A Translation Bureau that focused on rendering foreign scientifi c and political treatises into Chinese was established, and grand plans for industrialization and exploiting natural resources were formulated if not always implemented. One reform of which the Qing were particularly proud was the creation of crack troops, called the “New Army,” who were assigned to the supervision of General , managed in accordance with the German and Japanese military methods, and supervised by German offi cers. But despite all that had been done to strengthen China militarily and in other ways, a war with Japan over control over Korea that began in 1894 ended in disaster the following year. When even China’s New Army units were soundly thrashed on the battlefi eld, the progress of the last decades was deemed insuffi cient. More dramatic action was clearly needed. A symbolic turning point came in 1897 with the famous scholar Yan Fu’s transla- tion of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics. The Fujian Arsenal Academy where Yan Fu studied language was founded as a direct result of Self-Strengthening initiatives, and the interest in foreign language and thought that compelled him to translate this treatise were both patently the products of that movement. This fi rst translation of a European philosophical treatise by a Chinese scholar foreshad- owed a new way of thinking about time among intellectuals of the Qing, for the introduction of Social Darwinist thought of Huxley and his ilk became a widely popular explanation for China’s recent failures. The focus shifted from not just worrying about catching up with the West through advanced learning, but avoiding the extinction of the entire nation. The impact of Yan Fu’s translation refl ected a growing anxiety over China’s place in an emerging global order. It ushered in a period defi ned by concern with and fascination about the question of how China measured up to Western timelines that were based on ideas of evolution and forward motion.

VISIONS OF REFORM IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE CHINA From newness comes greatness and magnanimity, while cruelty and smallness are the children of the old. (Kang Youwei 1898)

In the Classic of Changes it says: “What is lacking must transform. Once transformed, a thing begins to function again. Fulfi lling its function, it may last through the ages.” (Liang Qichao 1896)

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There were those, previously, who used distinctions between “old” and “new” to exercise illicit authority and invite disaster . . . who doesn’t know that when the villain Kang Youwei spoke of a “New Way,” what he really meant was the way of rebellion? (Dowager Empress Cixi 1901)

The fi nal years of the nineteenth century saw a sense of crisis take hold among many people, increasing a sense that something had to give. Clashes between new and old began to reach a crescendo that fi t in with broader fi n-de-siècle trends. Even if few people in China knew that a century was ending, many worried that an age was at an end. Some began to voice the opinion that dramatic moves were needed to keep China from being undone by the challenges of the time. Compelled by a growing sense of urgency, authors even wondered whether or not China might even become a colony of the West, following the painful path of neighboring India. Much discussion in this period was haunted by the notion that China could become a wangguo (literally “lost country”). At the same time that different voices focused on a range of concerns about the future, a range of opinions existed about how disaster might be averted. Could doubling down on tradition save the realm? Did the Qing imperial family need to adopt new ideas and methods formerly considered too foreign and unfamiliar for implementation in China? And if it did this, how exactly should novel ways be assessed, adopted, and indigenized? Or, most radically of all, could the country only be saved if the dynasty was replaced? If so, was hope of salvation best invested in a new ruling house (as had happened periodically throughout history) or in an entirely novel scheme of governance in imitation of other, stronger nations? This section surveys some of the basic features of the arguments for reform that emerged in fi n- de-siècle China; we then move on to consider the proponents of revolution in the following segment. In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat of the Qing in 1895, differences of opinion within the elite became more acute. By 1898, demand for reform was fi nally heard within the imperial court itself, which embarked on a bold period of experimental legislation, modeled in large part on the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The two reformers most commonly associated with the 1898 reforms, Kang Youwei and his main protégé Liang Qichao, were both proponents of borrowing heavily from the West and modeling Chinese reform on the experiences of Japan. Japan’s appeal to many reformers lay in the fact that it was a nearby country, presumed to share some basic traits with China, which had managed to become stronger than China in the process of adapting new ideas and technologies from the West. The precedent of Japan’s Meiji Restoration was particularly palatable to members of the imperial court because the Land of the Rising Sun had kept its emperor in place throughout the nation’s radical restructuring. The twin objects of advancement and centralization made an alluring pro- spect. Juxtaposed against the increasingly fashionable interest in technological and intellectual transplants from other nations, the program of imperial reforms outlined by Kang and Liang carried powerful rhetorical force. Their proposals were oriented around visions of a clear contrast between past failures and future possibilities. As Liang Qichao put it in 1896:

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Why must governments change? In all that is between heaven and earth, there is nothing that does not change. The darkness of night turns to light, and the cold of winter gives way to the heat of the summer as the years shift . . . Now all over the globe the myriad nations are linked with another, locked in ever-mounting contention and competition that cannot be escaped. (Liang 1896)

By the summer of 1898, Kang and Liang had won the endorsement of the Guangxu Emperor, who invited reformers to suggest the most urgent steps for reform. Kang’s response argued that full-scale reinvention of the Chinese order was needed:

From newness comes accord, while perversity emerges from the old. From newness comes life, while rigidity is the result of the old. From newness comes fl ow and exchange, while stagnation alone emerges from the old . . . when all things are old [in a realm], then only doom lies in the future . . . Recently Russia, Japan, and Siam have introduced government reforms, and so have grown strong under the leadership of the monarchy. India, Turkey, and Egypt cleave to the old and do not change, and so have been cut apart and extinguished! (Kang 1898)

Compelled by these and similar arguments, the emperor poured his energy into reforms. More than 40 imperial decrees were issued in the 103 days of 1898 when Kang and Liang had his ear. This brief period became known as the Hundred Days Reform. During this celebration of new approaches to governance, the military reforms of the Self-Strengthening era were continued through commands to purchase new materiel and train further troops in the new style. A newly mandated Bureau of Commerce made earlier vague plans for economic development more concrete; railways were planned, agricultural modernization discussed. The educational system was also targeted: the evaluation of traditional exams for imperial offi cials was revised, and new schools designed to teach “western learning” were slated for opening. Not even the administrative structure of the empire was safe, as initiatives to simplify the legal codes of the dynasty, and to abolish redundant and sinecure posts, were adopted. An exuberant atmosphere of reform prevailed. However, before the end of 1898 – or the wuxu year, as it was known by Chinese reckoning – it was clear that it would be remembered for abortive rather than thoroughgoing reforms. After several months’ backing by the emperor, a conservative backlash came, spearheaded by members of the imperial family more skeptical of the new and the foreign, such as the , that left the progressive youthful monarch under house arrest. The emperor was silenced, his small cadre of reformers killed or frightened into exile. The recent reform edicts became a dead letter, and talk of the “new” was banned at court. The next central court pronouncement on things foreign and new took place years later, in the year 1900, under very different circumstances, during a chaotic summer in which angry North China peasants, whom Westerners dubbed “Boxers”

246 — Did China have a fin de siècle? —

(due to their use of martial arts practices), laid siege to the foreign legations of Beijing. The Boxers blamed a terrible drought that had recently devastated the country on the anger of local gods who had been affronted by the activities of practitioners of the foreign creed of Christianity. The fi rst targets of the Boxers were Chinese Christians and Western missionaries. Boxer rhetoric provided a conclusion about the infl uence of things new and foreign that was quite the inverse of the Hundred Days reformers: Western religion, Western interests, and the Christian god were responsible for China’s problems, not the answer to it. Novelty did not contain hope for the future, but doom in the present. There was division within the Qing and among the offi cials who served it about how to respond to this total inversion of the temporal rhetoric of the fi n-de-siècle moment. Some dismissed the Boxers as representing backwardness and banditry. Others argued that, given the government’s inability to hold its own against foreign powers via other means, the insurgents, who sometimes spoke of protecting the Qing, represented a new kind of hope for the dynasty. In a fateful move, the Qing threw their support behind the Boxers. The timing could hardly have been worse; soon after, a consortium of foreign armies stormed into North China, crushed the movement, freed the foreigners held captive, and forced the imperial family briefl y into exile. From her place in the exiled court at Xi’an, the Dowager Empress Cixi now offered a new pronouncement on how to renew the Qing government and its subjects. In an important memorial that later became famous as the opening sally of revived reforms, she opened with scathing comments about Kang’s version of a “New Way,” which she saw as an effort to undermine the Qing, before refl ecting on the possibility that reform ought to be considered once more. The edict began: “In every age there are those principles which are immutable regardless of the passage of time. But if a system of governance does not change it is impossible to adapt and survive” (Dowager Empress Cixi 1901). Later in the edict, Cixi concluded that previous reforms had not gone deep enough to address the systemic causes of China’s difference from the West. She solicited the advice of court ministers and imperial offi cials on the subject of how to move China forward:

Of late those who have studied the ways of the West have covered language and mechanics alone. But these are merely the external visage, and not the true root, of Western governance . . . China cannot study the path of Western nations to strength and wealth one word or one technique at a time . . . [All offi cials should] consider the current situation, and discuss the basic tenets of governance in China and the West. Raise for discussion any and all fl aws of the empire. The bureaucracy, the people’s living, the educational system, the civil exams, the military, and state fi nance: which should be continued and which reformed? . . . How can the national affairs be made to prosper? (Dowager Empress Cixi 1901)

The responses to this memorial initiated a decade-long project of imperial reforms and social initiatives to reclaim the former glory of the Qing. And, in spite of Cixi’s prohibition against the terms “New” and “Old” in policy discussions, the reforms became collectively known as the “New Policy” movement.

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Many of the reforms that emerged during this era dated back directly to the trials of the nineteenth century, but the reform was unprecedented in its scope and depth. Several of the earliest initiatives adopted during the New Policy era targeted the country’s educational system. In 1901 the beginnings of a public school infrastructure were mandated, with universities planned in the capital city, middle schools in each prefectural seat, and elementary schools in every county seat of government. From 1904, initiatives to form specialized institutions for the study of professions and for teachers appeared. In 1905, a Bureau of Education was created to oversee these projects, and the examination system – which had garnered so much praise and condemnation over the ages – was offi cially dismantled. Legal education and reform was another cornerstone of the New Policy. In 1901, China’s fi rst Bureau of Foreign Affairs was established to regularize relations with other nations. Legal experts Shen Jiaben and Wu Tingfang were charged with the task of developing a new Criminal and Civil Code for the Qing, and a new court system was proposed at the local level. Ambitious commercial policies were pro- posed in this era as well, ranging from fi scal reform to large-scale projects for mineral exploitation. The Bureau of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture, fi rst mentioned during the Hundred Days Reform, was fi nally created in 1903. Its fi rst command was to formulate a Commercial Code. Plans to build railroad lines connecting the commercial centers of the empire were supported by both the central state and thousands of local merchants and gentry, who purchased stock for partial ownership in the planned railroad lines. New laws and policies designed to protect and reward commerce refl ected a strong commitment to the develop- ment of China’s economy. Rewards were promised to innovative industrialists and entrepreneurs, and national expositions and fairs were organized to foster and celebrate Chinese businesses. In an effort to generate support, enthusiasm, and guidance for these reforms, the Qing also allowed the creation of Provincial Assemblies to represent regional interests and municipal bodies to manage local projects. In the face of increasing pressure to establish a monarchy more in keeping with those seen in other nations, the Qing court even declared its intention in September of 1906 to formulate a constitution to frame the relationship between the imperial house, the institutions of self-government, and the empire’s subjects. By the end of the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, the New Policy reforms had altered many basic structures and routines of life. Social changes in response to, in sympathy with, and in anticipation of new reforms transformed the empire. Cities housed academies of scientifi c learning, international trade fi rms, new police bureaus, and a host of voluntary associations. Societies for the suppres- sion of opium thrived alongside new religious organizations espousing Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity; newspapers proliferated; the publishing industry boomed. The New Policy reforms shored up support for the Qing in some quarters, but the central court was not presenting the only compelling vision of China’s new role in the twentieth century. Beyond Beijing and the most enfranchised supporters of the New Policy initiatives, proponents of radical change and revolution grew increasingly vocal. Many of the men and women who argued that the Qing were incapable of the

248 — Did China have a fin de siècle? — type of change needed to avert disaster looked to Western struggles of 1776 and 1789 (and after 1917, to that year as well) for inspiration. Those who favored revolution were ready to jettison completely the dynastic system. We turn now to revolutionary thinking in fi n-de-siècle China.

VISIONS OF A NEW ORDER BEYOND THE QING Revolution is a universal rule of evolution . . . Revolution eliminates what is corrupt and holds on to what is good. Revolution is to advance from savagery to civilization. (Zou Rong 1903)

Throughout the nineteenth century, there were some, from White Lotus rebels to Taiping insurgents, who claimed that the only way that China could be renewed and revived was by overturning the Qing Dynasty and starting a completely new era. But it was only toward the end of the century that such calls for renewal posited that China needed to form a Republic. This idea found its expression in polemical tracts, such as the one authored by the young fi rebrand Zou Rong, who was arrested for his writings and soon died a martyr in prison. The dream of a Republic also animated the actions of underground revolutionary groups founded by fi gures like Sun Yat- sen, who had started out calling for reform than gravitated toward more radical positions. In the early 1900s, revolutionary fervor took hold in urban centers within the empire and among Chinese ex-patriots abroad. The revolutionary groups formed out of these crucibles of idealism and discontent combined several disparate ele- ments: sworn brotherhoods inspired by anti-Manchu rhetoric, whose members dreamed of restoring the Ming; revolutionary societies that found things to admire in the words and deeds of 1789 and more recently Russian anarchists; student organizations; and so on. Even the New Army personnel whose ranks were fi rst created by the Self-Strengthening movement and then bolstered by New Policy reforms began to form networks of resistance to Qing authority. Each potential revolutionary had a different story, and a background that separated him or her from the others. The only thing that they agreed upon was that to survive China had to create something truly new, that the time for merely tinkering with the status quo had passed. Revolutionary plots sprouted up across the empire. One – in the city of Wuchang – ended up, through a series of planned and unplanned developments, laying the groundwork for what was later described as the 1911 Revolution, although the term makes it seem like a more coherent event than it actually was. The began ahead of schedule on 9 October 1911, after an accidental explo- sion occurred in a munitions workshop belonging to a revolutionary party. The accident threatened to bring offi cial scrutiny to the organization, so members of Wuchang’s New Army, recognizing that their involvement with anti-Qing groups was about to be exposed, went on the offensive. The city’s Qing offi cials were forced into fl ight and the army proclaimed itself to be China’s legitimate rulers. On 11 October, Li Yuanhong, the commander of the newly established military government declared:

249 — Maura Dykstra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom —

The people of our nation have no need to fear the Righteous Military forces. We have risen up to save the people, and not for any selfi sh or greedy purpose . . . You all have suffered gravely. You have been sinking in a sea of bitterness. It is all because of the tyranny of another race . . . The righteous outrage at this abuse infl ames the land and reaches all the way to the heavens . . . Today . . . the fl ag of righteousness has been raised! (Zhu 1986, 649)

From 10 October through to the end of 1911, city after city declared independence. In most cities, offi cers of the very New Army that had been formed to protect the Qing took up positions of authority in new revolutionary governments, which were widely supported by students of the new schools. On 7 November 1911, Li Yuanhong began discussions with the leaders of other independent provinces about how to form a single provisional government. Representatives of every province traveled to Nanjing, which was chosen as the future capital of the country being born, and they chose Sun Yat-sen to be Provisional President of what would be called the Republic of China. On 31 December, these delegates – now formally constituted as a National Assembly – formally declared the decision to employ the solar calendar. Xing reported: “Today the National Assembly has decided to switch to using the solar calendar, and the convention of counting each year from the founding of the Republic of China. Tomorrow will be the fi rst day of the fi rst month of the fi rst year of the Republic of China” (Zhu 1986, 1164). On 1 January 1912, a new temporal order began with Sun taking his inaugural pledge as Provisional President of the just-created Republic. The event was reported in the Eastern Miscellany, which transcribed Sun’s speech beginning as follows:

The collapse of the tyrannical government of the Manchus is consolidated with the establishment of the Republic of China. Its purpose is to secure the prosperity of the people, and to realize the ambitions of the people with loyalty to the nation and service to the masses. The collapse of the tyrannical political system of the past has happened almost seamlessly and without disorder. The Republic now stands tall among the nations of the world . . . (Dongfang zazhi Vol. 8, No. 11, 9)

Sun then called for a “switch to using the solar calendar, thereby declaring this day the fi rst day of the fi rst year of the fi rst month of the Republic of China.” The declaration of the dawn of a new age and a new way of marking time was thus the fi rst offi cial order promulgated by the new Republic of China. From then on, the movement of time in China would offi cially be in sync with the other nations of the world, and years would be reckoned from the day the Republic was born. It was not just the end of an era: it was the conclusion of dynastic time, and the beginning of a new temporal regime tied to the Chinese nation. The beginning of a new temporal cycle was not, however, the end of China’s fi n de siècle. Many Chinese intellectuals quickly came to feel that the old ways had just changed their name, not been overthrown. More than a change of calendar and of titles was needed for a New China worthy of the name to be created.

250 — Did China have a fin de siècle? —

A NEW AGE: CHINA’S TWENTIETH CENTURY China’s literature has been withering and decaying for a long time. It has been a hundred years since anyone vigorous has arisen. There’s a new tide that cannot be stopped. It is time for a literary revolution. (Hu Shi 1915)

We have to give up the useless and irrelevant elements of traditional literature and ethics, because we want to create those needed for the progress of a new era and new society. (Chen Duxiu 1919)

Revolutionary exultation and the celebration of China’s fi rst Republic soon gave way to confusion and dissatisfaction, as China’s politicians, military leaders, students, workers, entrepreneurs, artists, and rural households realized that there was little agreement about how to realize the Republican dream. In February of 1912, just a month after Sun Yat-sen’s installment in the offi ce of President, the internationally recognized revolutionary fi gurehead was forced to concede his position to Yuan, a commander whose troops in the north of China had been responsible for negotiating the surrender of the young Last Emperor. An uneasy tension came into being, as those still eager to bring a brand-new age into being had to deal with the mundane nature of political realities, in which might seemed at times all that mattered. Soon, the tension between the ambitious dreams of active political Chinese and the cautious Yuan regime, which shared power with other military commanders with armies personally loyal to them, grew into full-fl edged resentment, and China’s political world was divided into competing visions of what the Republic should be. The National Assembly, which had fi rst convened in 1910 to draft a constitution and had supported the provisional presidencies of fi rst Sun and then Yuan, was one of the fi rst victims of the turmoil. The 1913 nation-wide election of delegates, which had placed Sun’s newly formed Nationalist Party as the clear majority in the new nation’s Parliament, degenerated into fi ghting and chaos as political rivals were assassinated, and pressure from Provisional President Yuan resulted in a series of forced referendums declaring the leader the elected head of state. That year, Sun was forced back into exile and fi ghting began to break out all over China between members of the parties now vying for political control. Yuan outlawed the popular Nationalist Party, removed its members from Parliament, and, in January 1914, fi nally dissolved the entire body. Confl ict over the fate of China’s new Republic mounted slowly over the course of the fi rst years of its existence. New voices – concluding that the founding of a new government was clearly not enough – began to propose more drastic measures for carving out a path for the future. What ensued was known as the New Culture Movement. The central claim of the members of this intellectual enterprise – many of them students and faculty at China’s prestigious universities, such as Peking University – was that simply altering China’s system of governance was not enough. Something deeper needed to happen. The people of the nation needed a new culture. Change could not be imposed from without, but must be cultivated from within.

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Young voices clamoring for change came together to forge a rallying cry for resistance against the current regime in 1919, under the banner of what was known as the May Fourth movement. This movement formed in reaction to the 1919 verdict of the Versailles Peace Conference to cede Germany’s possessions in China – now surrendered in defeat after World War I – to Japan, in spite of the fact that China had fought on the side of the allies, and lobbied enthusiastically for a return of its territories. This diplomatic, political, and territorial loss was the breaking point for the generation of students and intellectuals who had witnessed the fi rst decade of the Republic with grim cynicism. Dissatisfaction with the new government was now expressed as outright resistance, as protests against the establishment spilled into the streets of China’s urban centers. The tensions leading up to this intellectual crisis extended at least as far back as the beginning of what we have labeled here China’s fi n-de-siècle moment. The westward- facing desire to learn the technology and statecraft of a new age, inherited from the Self-Strengthening movement of the nineteenth century, had fi rst inspired much of the intellectual foundation of inquiry and cosmopolitan expectations of this new genera- tion. Concerns from the late nineteenth century about China falling behind in a Darwinian struggle for existence among the world’s nations were triggered by this failure in the early twentieth century. The outward-looking intellectual development of the nineteenth century had been realized in the twentieth century in a way that it could never have been before, by students educated in the styles of “western learning” that had been introduced over previous decades. Exposed to world affairs, and com- paring the domestic situation to the situations in other nations abroad, they concluded that the existing regime was fl oundering under the death grip of feudal thought. And the hope of a new China, which was powerful enough to have motivated decades of reform and innovation, still burned in the hearts of the young men and women who began, increasingly, to conclude that the fatal fl aw of China’s revolution was that it had not gone far enough. Students and young activists became convinced that the intellectual ferment of the fi rst decade of the Republic could no longer be confi ned to dissent, but must be translated into action, and this led to both a rejuvenation of the Nationalist Party and the founding of the group that would alternately be its ally and its great rival, the Chinese Communist Party. A cynicism and disgust with the status quo imbued the May Fourth movement and the political discourse of the early twentieth century with a sense of urgency. No author did more to articulate this disgust with the failure of China’s new regime than a writer who used the pen name Lu Xun (alternative romanization Lu Hsun, birth name Zhou Shuren). In his preface to a compilation of stories bound together by meditations on China’s failure to shake free of its past, he described the nation as painfully trapped. In what became a famous analogy, he compared the nation to an iron house:

Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn? (Lu 1922)

252 — Did China have a fin de siècle? —

The fi n-de-siècle anxiety, eagerness, and exuberance that we have surveyed briefl y here had, as this eloquent wording suggests, climaxed in a renewed sense of crisis. This would drive political development for the remainder of the twentieth century. Students, communist leaders, urban political activists, government leaders, writers, and the whole body of men and women who experienced the revolutionary tumult of the decades stretching from the New Culture Movement through the 1980s and beyond were, in many ways, still living with the repercussions of the struggle between old and new that defi ned China’s distinctive fi n-de-siècle experience.

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