Hoo boy. Lots to tackle here.
We'll start with the first and most obvious issue, that of the Chinese population being 'indoctrinated into believing the divinity of the emperor'. China is and was not Japan, and the institution of the empire operated on markedly different principles. Dynasties rose and fell all the time, as the emperor was not himself divine. Rather, he was mandated to rule by Heaven, and if the ruler became unjust, Heaven's displeasure would manifest as a series of disasters like river floods, frontier wars, famines and civil disorder (conveniently enough the typical signs of breakdown in effective rule), and a new dynasty would have to rise to take the place of the old. Indeed, the emperor as an individual was seen as potentially being very flawed indeed, and defiance of imperial orders were by no means inherently unacceptable so long as either the results were justified or the emperor never found out.^1 ^2
But the real meat of the question – that of why the Qing Dynasty fell, and by implication why it was not replaced by another dynasty inheriting the old system – is in itself quite an interesting one. What pressures led to revolution in 1911, and where did they originate?
Nationalism and Racial Tensions
The extent to which the Han-Manchu divide was a factor in the 1911 Revolution can be overstated – Cohen (1984) certainly opposes the suggestion that such residual tensions were an important issue – although it would be hard to deny that an emergent Han nationalism factored heavily into this.^3 Said nationalism was not a new feature of the 1910s. Proto-nationalist sentiments had to some extent contributed to the pro-Qing uprising of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900,^4 and the war with Japan in 1894-95 had been met with an extremely strong sense of national indignation.^5 However, the emergence of nationalist reactions to foreign wars was a comparatively late development. The refusal of Hong Kong dockworkers to service French ships returning from the Battle of Fuzhou in 1884 represented a marked change from the period of the Opium Wars, when Cantonese manual labourers made up nearly a quarter of the Anglo-French expedition to Beijing in 1860,^6 or when the population of Dinghai welcomed the British with open arms in October 1841.^4 Whilst these particular expressions of nationalism would be directed against foreigners outside the Qing empire, even so there was a particularly virulent feeling of anti-Manchuism during the revolutionary years that manifested as a whole succession of pogrom-like reprisals against Manchu populations in various towns and cities across China.
Specifically anti-Manchu sentiment had, of course, been evident since the very beginning of Qing rule in China, as the native Han population resisted their newfound foreign rulers. Ming loyalists took up both sword (such as Koxinga and Wu Sangui) and pen (such as Lü Liuliang) to resist the Qing decades into their invasion and takeover, and residual sentiments of this sort remained into the early eighteenth century with affairs like the Zeng Jing Conspiracy of 1727.^7 Anti-Manchuism resurfaced with a vengeance with the Taiping, who framed the Qing and Manchus as manifestations of demonic forces and targeted them almost genocidally.^8 Yet this was not quite the same sort of sentiment as seen in 1911. The anti-Manchu sentiments of 1911 were framed by a more distinctly pro-Han agenda than the simpler anti-Manchu feeling of earlier centuries, even if there were common features between them.
Strengthening of the Rural Elite
It is here that we must note that 1911 was not a revolution of any particular class, at least not in its origins. Rather, both the elite and the masses rose up that year against the Qing, and for their own different reasons. In the case of the masses, part of the problem was that the elite had become so powerful. Increasingly, farmland was being held by a smaller and smaller number of elite landlords, with an increasing number of people working as tenant farmers with only topsoil rights (the right to use the land and the need to pay tax on the profits) and not subsoil rights (the ownership of the land itself). The brief phase of rural support for the 1911 Revolution was motivated in large part by an assumption that the revolution would not just be a political one but also a chance to redress severe social issues. The rapid collapse of said rural support resulted from the discovery that that would not be so.^9
The empowerment of rural elites in many ways coincided with the strengthening of urban elites, particularly in the wake of the First Opium War. Whilst recent research by Chuck Wooldridge has shown that elite pressure in favour of greater decentralisation of power had preceded the Taiping War, at least as far as the Jiangnan region was concerned,^10 the actual expansion of rural authority emerged out of the desperation of the Qing state to defeat the Taiping, and their consequent devolution of authority through the likin transport tax and the official recognition of tuanlian militias.^11 By the early 1900s reforms were being conducted mainly through the elites, and rural resistance to the New Policy reforms demanded by the Boxer Protocols generally targeted what were perceived as extensions of elite authority at the expense of the populace.^12
Urban Reformist Sentiment
On the urban side of the equation, there was an increasing move towards more Western models of the state, which expressed itself initially as constitutionalism, which proposed the establishment of a constitutional monarchy whereby the emperor's powers would be heavily circumscribed by more oligarchic organs of power like provincial assemblies and a national parliament. Efforts at constitutional reform like the Hundred Days' Reforms were generally quashed by court factionalism, and there began to be a growing trend towards more outright republicanism as time went on. Both the emergent bourgeois and proletarian populations of the major cities were increasingly inclined against the Qing, and urban radicals with Western educations would be at the forefront of the revolution during its outbreak in the Huguang region.^9
The 'Westernising reformist elite', as Esherick terms them, were a faction that had been developing over many decades, particularly in the post-Taiping era, as exposure to European technology and institutions by wealthy urbanites served as inspiration for reform. Some such elites were very much local ones, others operated from overseas like Wang Tao or Sun Yat-Sen. Ultimately it would be the domestic and not the émigré Westernisers who brought the revolution to fruition, but the comparatively international nature of this new category of elite is worth noting.^9
General Loss of Faith in the Qing
Frustration with the Qing government had been pretty consistent since their establishment, and although it quietened down under the latter part of the Kangxi reign (1661-1722), the Yongzheng reign (1722-1735) and the Qianlong reign (1735-1796), it returned with a vengeance upon the accession of the Jiaqing Emperor in 1796. The White Lotus Revolt, inspired by pipe dreams of a Ming restoration, engulfed Hubei and spilled out into neighbouring provinces, and indiscriminate Qing reprisals led to Imperial soldiers being nicknamed the 'Red Lotus Society' for the trail of fire and blood that seemed to follow their every move, prompting militias to take affairs into their own hands.^11 ^13 Such militias in Guangdong in 1841 declared themselves as being prepared against any threat, be it the British or the Qing,^2 ^5 and anti-Qing sentiment in the core regions of Han settlement absolutely boiled over in the 1850s with dozens of revolts of varying scale, from the Taiping Civil War (1851-66) on the Yangtze to the Red Turban Revolt (1854-56) in Guangdong to the Small Sword Uprising (1852-3) in Shanghai. Both elite and masses in the postwar era began to simply ignore imperial instructions. During the reconstruction of Nanjing, elites prioritised Confucian temples and academies over sites of imperial significance. Government memorials to fallen soldiers and civilians were instead used for birthday parties or quarantine centres as the public preferred to use their own means of commemoration, and eventually the government bodies responsible for such efforts were essentially reduced to a rubber stamp for grassroots initiatives.^14 Add to that a whole succession of ignominious defeats in foreign wars to France (1884-5), Japan (1894-5) and the Eight Nations' Alliance (1900) and it was becoming increasingly clear that the Qing could no longer be relied upon.
Concluding Statements
What should be surprising to us is less that the Qing did fall in 1912, but rather that they didn't fall sooner. The Qing empire was an absolute mass of contradictions, with immense ethnic, class and geographical divides, and in some ways their resilience over the course of over a century of these tensions reaching their breaking point should be seen as quite an impressive achievement.
Sources, Notes and References