Asia's Transformations

A century ago, in 1911, China embarked on a revolutionary course that lasted through most of the twentieth century. The 1911 Revolution ended two millennia of imperial rule and established the Republic of China, but dissatisfaction with the early republic fueled further revolutionary movements, each intended to be more thoroughgoing than the last-from the National Revolution of the 1920s, to the Communist Revolution, and finally the Cultural Revolution. As the event that launched China on this revolutionary course, the 1911 Revolution has long been a focus of historical inquiry, but most scholarship-both Chinese and international-has focused on the revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-sen. Especially in China, where Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party (Guomindang) ruled from 1927 to 1949 (and in Taiwan after 1949 as well), the ruling regime has always laid claim to the legacy of 1911.

This book shifts the focus from the revolutionary movement, which mainly operated abroad and was in considerable disarray in 1911, to the multiplicity of domestic political forces that undermined the old regime as the Qing empire, dominated by a Manchu ruling family, struggled to reform itself and defend the nation against imperialist threats from abroad. This will be the first major English-language collection presenting the new scholarship of China's leading authorities on the 1911 revolution, scholarship that has been informed by much wider use of archival sources, diaries, memoirs and private correspondence of leading members of the Qing state.

China: How the Empire Fell will be of huge interest to students and scholars of modern Chinese history as well as those of contemporary China.